gress, apathy produced by a new period of prosperity, popular financial delusion, and differences of opinion among the friends of reform may raise formidable obstacles in the way even of partial measures, and still more in the way of any comprehensive plan, for the removal of generally acknowledged evils. But, whatever steps it may be possible to take, little will be gained if they do not turn plainly towards the objects above stated, and proceed courageously and unequivocally upon the general lines which the present writer, following many others, has reviewed in these pages.

CHARLES F. DUNBAR.

CHARITY AND PROGRESS.*

MORE than two thousand years ago Plato warned his countrymen, in strangely modern phrase, against the physical, moral, and political degradation in store for any nation which perpetuated the unfit and allowed its citizens to breed from weak and enervated stock. So eager was he to shock his contemporaries into a realization of the dangers of degeneration and the necessity of artificial selection, that he sketched for them the startling outlines of an imaginary Republic, in which no considerations of property, no bonds of family life, no sentiment of pity, was allowed to stand in the way of that elimination of weakness and that perfection of the race which he conceived to be the indispensable basis of progressive civili

zation.

To-day evolutionist philosophers are dinning the same message in our ears. Behold, they say, the paradox of progress! Civilization destroys itself, puts the knife to its own throat, perishes by its own hand, or rather dies miserably of the slow poison of its own virtues. For the growth of civilization is but a name for the growth of sympathy. The fruits of sympathy are philanthropy, charity, sanitation, medical science, all that makes against the sufferings of our race. These, again, are but methods of protecting the weak, perpetuating the unfit, reversing the law of progress, destroying civilization and sympathy itself. Like Plato of old, the evolutionists complain loudly that man sees clearly enough what the law of progress is for the brute creation, but chooses to regard himself as an exception. Like him, they insist that there is absolutely no ground for this infatuation and mystery

*An address delivered at The National Conference of Unitarian and Other Christian Churches, Saratoga, New York, September, 1897.

with which man affects to surround the evolution of his own species. The same law applies to him as to the beasts that perish, the simple, inevitable, universal law of selection and survival which biology has already formulated for other animals. Selection, however, implies two things: it implies something selected, and no less surely something rejected, left behind to perish as unfit. Hence, as a recent English writer reiterates, in a reductio ad absurdum which seems to render refutation superfluous, there can be no real progress for a society which is not improvident enough to multiply more rapidly than subsistence and environment will warrant. There is nothing but decay in store for any society which is not crowding unfit members to the wall, which has not its "submerged tenth" sinking inevitably beneath the waves of poverty and competition. Improvidence, weakness, degradation, and suffering are with you always, because, forsooth, they are the signs of health, the growing-pains of progress.

How, then, we are asked, can modern society escape speedy degeneration? Philanthropy is present in the world on a new and gigantic scale. Every day civilization finds it harder to see the weak pushed to the wall. Philanthropy deals a twofold blow at progress. It not only perpetuates the weak: the essence of it is self-sacrifice of the strong to the weak. Thus the law of progress is reversed. Even science has joined the forces of degeneration. The deadly microbes of fever and contagious disease, which have been such efficient allies in the work of rejecting the weak, are being banished from the earth. All that the best intellect, the most patient ingenuity, the most unselfish devotion, can devise, is being used to preserve the weak, and enable him to transmit his weakness to future generations. Already the fatal consequences are but too plainly visible on every hand. Insane asylums, homes for defectives, prisons, reformatories, hospitals, shelters, wood-yards, soup depots, the whole

directory full of charitable activities of every sort, testify that the process of degeneration is well under way. As for remedies, the pessimistic aver there is no remedy, and abandon themselves to the luxury of disordered fancies and delirious exaggerations of impending ills. The optimistic join in Plato's plea for conscious effort to improve the race by breeding from the best stock, and by educating public opinion to the exercise of an enlightened, scientific sympathy, which shall refrain from evil-doing. For the unfit must either cease to be produced or cease to reproduce.

While this first group of philosophers are thus wringing their hands over the pathetic dilemma of progress, and lamenting that the sympathy which man has cherished in his bosom has warmed into a viper with a deadly sting, we are suddenly relieved to hear another confident and dogmatic voice from the evolutionary ranks, bidding them be of good cheer, for they are quite mistaken in their diagnosis of the case. Let no one worry over an illusory dilemma, or the alleged discomfiture of natural selection by sympathy and altruism. Natural selection is quite able to take care of itself. Neither philanthropy nor any other creature can interfere with the cosmic determinism which has ordained the law. Far from being an enemy, philanthropy is but the handmaid of selection, in disguise. Or, to be exact, philanthropy is the second handmaid; for religion is the first. Those have been deceived who thought they saw in religion and her philanthropic offspring a palliation of the struggle for life, a tendency to mitigate the ruthless rejection of the weak, a humanizing of those processes of natural selection and survival of the strong which are popularly called competition, a gospel of love and fraternity which should replace the gospel of strife. Religion is merely a part of the machinery of rejection,—a useful variation, by virtue of which a religious group, or civilization, surpasses a non-religious or less religious group, or civilization. Be

cause it mitigates the relentless struggle for life, do you ask? Quite the contrary. Because it makes possible a higher intensity of that struggle; because it enables the more religious society to bear the pains of rejection and extermination with greater fortitude; because it consoles the rejected of this world with the hope of happiness in the next; because it comforts the wounded and the dying with the anæsthetic of a future life, in which those who have lost father, mother, husband, children, lands, or wages, shall have them restored a hundred-fold; because it thus enables society to breed from the strongest, hardiest of its stock. Religion make the march of progress and the struggle for life less severe? Religion an enemy to natural selection? Nay, rather, it is religion which makes the forced march of modern progress possible. But for religious anæsthetics the rank and file of those who toil and suffer would be driven in desperation to join a socialistic mutiny, the march would be stopped, and some other more religious civilization would go to the front.

In like manner we are asked to believe that the second handmaid, philanthropy, only continues the good work by increasing the range and intensity of the struggle. The real significance of modern philanthropy is the gradual substitution of equality of opportunity for old inequalities based upon class distinctions, birth, and wealth. Philanthropy is the voluntary abdication of privilege, the willing self-sacrifice of those who have hitherto been doubly protected from the rigors of competitive rejection,by the barriers of privilege, on the one hand, and by the disabilities of the masses, on the other. Instead of angels of deliverance and mercy, religion and philanthropy are but furies in disguise, drugging the senses with ultrarational sanctions for an irrational struggle, and distributing among the poor the shining weapons of a more equal opportunity, in order that the fight may be fiercer and more universal, and the weaker, both of themselves and of their benefactors, sooner slain.