When from this point of view we compare man with the lower animals, so immense is his progress that we are tempted to believe perfection within the reach of his attainment.
Two things, however, suffice to keep alive evil in man:
While at almost every point he has so moulded his own environment as to eliminate the vices that characterize the rest of the animal kingdom, in two respects the predatory system still prevails:
The international conflict keeps nations in perpetual competition with one another, and this periodically forces them to war; and the intranational conflict keeps individuals in perpetual conflict with one another, and stimulates all the vices which most interfere with human happiness.
The international conflict seems doomed to continue so long as man remains separated by racial antipathies and commercial interests. Efforts are being made to diminish occasions for war to the utmost possible, by bringing all races to recognize and aim at the same social ideal. But there would still remain ample occasion for war so long as men are kept in competition by conflicting commercial interests. The task first in importance and time, therefore, seems to be to eliminate as much as is advisable the commercial and industrial conflict, which has been already pointed out to be the great intranational obstacle to human perfection and happiness.
Now the intranational conflict has been seen to result from our industrial system. This, as at present organized, is an artificial creation of man; indispensable though it may have been to the gradual evolution of the race, it has always acted, and must always act to keep alive in man the very quality—selfishness—the elimination of which is most essential to the happiness of a community, and the absence of which particularly characterizes natural communities such as those ants and bees.
While, then, man has resisted and in great part subdued Nature in the physical world by science, and in a world which he has himself created—the moral world—by self-restraint, he has added to this artificial environment two institutions which tend to counterbalance the advantages already secured. These are national governments that create international conflict, and an industrial system that creates intranational conflict; and we are confronted with the problem whether these two hothouses of crime, hatred, selfishness and vice, can be dispensed with.
Science affords us the encouraging hope that they can. It points out that man has already suppressed many of the most merciless effects of the natural environment; that by virtue of the power through which he can in great part create and certainly modify his own environment, he may still further push on the work of civilization if he will but recognize that the real enemy to human happiness is hatred and the real friend to it solidarity; and if he will return to the Gospel of Christ, which economic conditions have so far compelled him to disregard.
Before closing the study of evolution it is proper to point out that we are now in a position to dispose of the contention that, because natural evolution proceeds upon the principle of the survival of the fittest, therefore human evolution must proceed upon the same lines. This is the argument that millionaires and individualists set up against those who believe in the possibility of diminishing human misery by reducing the occasions for human conflict.
It is totally false.