Evolution and Ethics | Page 6

in the letters,
would be in no degree weakened. The "sixpennyworth of good" would
still be out-weighed by the "shillingsworth of harm"; if indeed the
relative worth, or unworth, of the latter should not be rated in pounds
rather than in shillings.
What would one not give for the opinion of the financial members of
the Committee about the famous Bank; and that of the legal experts
about the proposed "tribunes of the people"?
HODESLEA, EASTBOURNE, July, 1894.

CONTENTS
I
PAGE EVOLUTION AND ETHICS. PROLEGOMENA [1894] . . . . . .
1
II
EVOLUTION AND ETHICS [1893]. . . . . . . . . . . . .46
III
SCIENCE AND MORALS [1886]. . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
IV
CAPITAL--THE MOTHER OF LABOUR [1890] . . . . . . . 147
V
SOCIAL DISEASES AND WORSE REMEDIES [1891]. . . . . 188
Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 The Struggle for Existence in
Human Society. 195 Letters to the Times . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Legal
Opinions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312 The Articles of War of the Salvation
Army. . 321

[1]
I.
EVOLUTION AND ETHICS.
PROLEGOMENA.
[1894.]
I.
IT may be safely assumed that, two thousand years ago, before Caesar
set foot in southern Britain, the whole country-side visible from the
windows of the room in which I write, was in what is called "the state

of nature." Except, it may be, by raising a few sepulchral mounds, such
as those which still, here and there, break the flowing contours of the
downs, man's hands had made no mark upon it; and the thin veil of
vegetation which overspread the broad-backed heights and the shelving
sides of the coombs was unaffected by his industry. The native grasses
and weeds, the scattered patches of gorse, contended with one another
for the possession of the scanty surface soil; they fought against the
droughts of summer, the frosts of winter, and the furious gales which
swept, with unbroken force, now from the [2] Atlantic, and now from
the North Sea, at all times of the year; they filled up, as they best might,
the gaps made in their ranks by all sorts of underground and
overground animal ravagers. One year with another, an average
population, the floating balance of the unceasing struggle for existence
among the indigenous plants, maintained itself. It is as little to be
doubted, that an essentially similar state of nature prevailed, in this
region, for many thousand years before the coming of Caesar; and there
is no assignable reason for denying that it might continue to exist
through an equally prolonged futurity, except for the intervention of
man.
Reckoned by our customary standards of duration, the native vegetation,
like the "everlasting hills" which it clothes, seems a type of permanence.
The little Amarella Gentians, which abound in some places to-day, are
the descendants of those that were trodden underfoot, by the prehistoric
savages who have left their flint tools, about, here and there; and they
followed ancestors which, in the climate of the glacial epoch, probably
flourished better than they do now. Compared with the long past of this
humble plant, all the history of civilized men is but an episode.
Yet nothing is more certain than that, measured by the liberal scale of
time-keeping of the universe, this present state of nature, however it
may seem to have gone and to go on for ever, is [3] but a fleeting phase
of her infinite variety; merely the last of the series of changes which the
earth's surface has undergone in the course of the millions of years of
its existence. Turn back a square foot of the thin turf, and the solid
foundation of the land, exposed in cliffs of chalk five hundred feet high
on the adjacent shore, yields full assurance of a time when the sea
covered the site of the "everlasting hills"; and when the vegetation of
what land lay nearest, was as different from the present Flora of the

Sussex downs, as that of Central Africa now is.* No less certain is it
that, between the time during which the chalk was formed and that at
which the original turf came into existence, thousands of centuries
elapsed, in the course of which, the state of nature of the ages during
which the chalk was deposited, passed into that which now is, by
changes so slow that, in the coming and going of the generations of
men, had such witnessed them, the contemporary, conditions would
have seemed to