n, and profited
largely by, the removal to a distant place of the entire population
of an island on which the people had led the usual life of the
Polynesian. He and his associates sold three hundred men to
plantation labor, which they hated and to which they were
unaccustomed. Within a year two hundred and fifty of them had died
as fast as disease could sap their grief-stricken bodies. Their
former home, which they died longing to see again, was made a
feeding-place for sheep. The merchants reaped a double toll. They
were paid well for delivering the owners of the land to the
plantations, and in addition they got the land.

Now, my acquaintance is a man of university education, a quoter of
Haeckel and Darwin, with "survival of the fittest" as his guiding
motto since his Jena days. Says he, quoting a Scotchman:

"Tone it down as you will, the fact remains that Darwinism regards
animals as going up-stairs, in a struggle for individual ends, often
on the corpses of their fellows, often by a blood-and-iron
competition, often by a strange mixture of blood and cunning, in
which each looks out for himself and extinction besets the hindmost."

Further says my stern acquaintance, specially when in his cups:

"The whole system of life-development is that of the lower providing
food for the higher in ever-expanding circles of organic existence,
from protozoea to steers, from the black African to the educated and
employing man. We build on the ribs of the steers, and on the backs
of the lower grade of human."

Scientific books have taken the place of the Bible as a
quotation-treasury of proof for whatever their reader most desires
to prove. Now I am no scientist and take, indeed, only the casual
interest of the average man in the facts and theories of science.
But it appears to me that in his theory of the survival of the
fittest my acquaintance curiously overlooks the question of man's
own survival as a species.

If we are to base our actions upon this cold-blooded and inhuman
view of the universe, let us consider that universe as in fact
inhuman, and having no concern for man except as a species of animal
very possibly doomed to extinction, as many other species of animal
have been doomed in the past, unless he proves his fitness to
survive not as an individual, but as a species.

Now man is a gregarious animal; he lives in herds. The
characteristic of the herd is that within it the law of survival of
the fittest almos