t, all the social virtues. The difficulty seems to be
felt in regard to those purely altruistic impulses, which, at first
glance at any rate, make it apparently our duty to preserve those who
would otherwise be unfit to live. Virtue, says Professor Huxley, is
directed "not so much to the survival of the fittest," as to the
"fitting of as many as possible to survive". I do not dispute the
statement, I think it true in a sense; but I have a difficulty as to
its application.

Morality, it is obvious, must be limited by the conditions in which we
are placed. What is impossible is not a duty. One condition plainly is
that the planet is limited. There is only room for a certain number of
living beings; and though we may determine what shall be the number, we
cannot arbitrarily say that it shall be indefinitely great. It is one
consequence that we do, in fact, go on suppressing the unfit, and
cannot help going on suppressing them. Is it desirable that it should
be otherwise? Should we wish, for example, that America could still be
a hunting-ground for savages? Is it better that it should contain a
million red men or sixty millions of civilised whites? Undoubtedly the
moralist will say with absolute truth that the methods of extirpation
adopted by Spaniards and Englishmen were detestable. I need not say
that I agree with him, and hope that such methods may be abolished
wherever any remnant of them exists. But I say so partly because I
believe in the struggle for existence. This process underlies morality,
and operates whether we are moral or not. The most civilised race, that
which has the greatest knowledge, skill, power of organisation, will, I
hold, have an inevitable advantage in the struggle, even if it does not
use the brutal means which are superfluous as well as cruel. All the
natives who lived in America a hundred years ago would be dead now in
any case, even if they had invariably been treated with the greatest
humanity, fairness, and consideration. Had they been unable to suit
themselves to new conditions of life, they would have suffered an
euthanasia instead of a partial extirpation; and had they suited
themselves they would either have been absorbed or become a useful part
of the population. To abolish the old brutal method is not to abolish
the struggle for existence, but to make the result depend upon a higher
order of qualities than those of the mere piratical viking.

Mr. Pearson has been telling us in his mo