ry moralists had prepared, which Schopenhauer
had formulated, which George Eliot had passionately preached, which had
around its operations the immense prestige of the gospel of Jesus. The
environmental Socialists--always quite reasonably--set themselves to
improve the conditions of labour; they provided local relief for the
poor; they built hospitals for the free treatment of the sick. They are
proceeding to feed school children, to segregate and protect the
feeble-minded, to insure the unemployed, to give State pensions to the
aged, and they are even asked to guarantee work for all. Now these
things, and the likes of them, are not only in accordance with natural
human impulses, but for the most part they are reasonable, and in
protecting the weak the strong are, in a certain sense, protecting
themselves. No one nowadays wants the hungry to hunger or the suffering
to suffer. Indeed, in that sense, there never has been any
_laissez-faire_ school.[258]

But as the movement of environmental Socialism realizes itself, it
becomes increasingly clear that it is itself multiplying the work which
it sets itself to do. In enabling the weak, the incompetent, and the
defective to live and to live comfortably, it makes it easier for those
on the borderland of these classes to fall into them, and it furnishes
the conditions which enable them to propagate their like, and to do
this, moreover, without that prudent limitation which is now becoming
universal in all classes above those of the weak, the incompetent, and
the defective. Thus unchecked environmental Socialism, obeying natural
impulses and seeking legitimate ends, would be drawn into courses at the
end of which only social enfeeblement, perhaps even dissolution, could
be seen.

The key to the situation, it is now beginning to be more and more widely
felt, is to be found in the counterbalancing tendency of Individualism,
and the eugenic guardianship of the race. Not, rightly understood, as a
method of arresting environmental Socialism, nor even as a counterblast
to its gospel of sympathy. Nietzsche, indeed, has made a famous assault
on sympathy, as he has on conventional morality generally, but his
"immoralism" in general and his "hardness" in particular are but new and
finer manifestations of those faded virtues he was really seeking to
revive. The superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar;
the more deeply sympathetic man builds an almshouse for him so that h