loO ESSAYS AND LEITERS
accord with wliicli all beings strugsrle against one another, and only the fittest survive. Man also is sub- ject to this law ; and thanks only to it has man become Avhat he now is. But this law runs counter to morality. How, then, can it be reconciled with morality ? ITiat can be accomplished in this way : A law of social pro- gress exists, which seeks to check the cosmic j>rocess, and to replace it by another, an ethical, process, the object of which is the survival, not of the fittest, but of the best in an ethical sense. >'here this ethical process sprang from, Mr. Huxley does not explain, but in his 20th foot-note he says that the basis of this process is, on the one hand, that peojile, like animals, prefer to be in company, and tlicreforesuj)y)ress in themselves quali- ties harmful to societies ; and, on the other hand, that the members of a society forcibly suppress actions con- trary to social welfare. It seems to Mr. Huxley that this process, obliging men to curb their passions for the sake of preserving tlie group of which they are members, and for fear of being punished if they disturbed the order of their group, supplies that ethical law the existence of which he wishes to demonstrate. It seems to Mr. Huxley, in the naivete' of his soul, that in English society, as it exists to-day — ^ith its Irish problem, the poverty of its lowest classes, the insen- sate luxury of the rich, its trade in opium and spirits, its executions, its slaughter or extermination of tribes for the sake of trade and politics, its secret vice and its liypocrisy — the man who does not infringe the police regulations is a moral man, guided by the ethical law. He forgets that the qualities needful to maintain the society in which a man lives may be useful for that society — as the qualities of the members of a band of robbers may be useful to that band, and as in our own society we find a use for the qualities of executioners, gaolers, judges, soldiers, and hypocrite-priests, etc. — but that these qualities have nothing in common with morality.
Morality is something continually developing and growing, and, therefore, conformity to the existing
