Can we learn so to think of the varying individuals of the whole human race? Can we do, that is to say, what Mazzini declared to be impossible? And if we can, shall we be able to love the fifteen hundred million different human beings of whom we are thus enabled to think?
To the first question the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 offered an answer. Since then we have in fact been able to represent the human race to our imagination, neither as a chaos of arbitrarily varying individuals, nor as a mosaic of homogeneous nations, but as a biological group, every individual in which differs from every other not arbitrarily but according to an intelligible process of organic evolution.[[113]] And, since that which exists for the imagination can exist also for the emotions, it might have been hoped that the second question would also have been answered by evolution, and that the warring egoisms of nations and empires might henceforth have been dissolved by love for that infinitely varying multitude whom we can watch as they work their way through so much pain and confusion towards a more harmonious relation to the universe.
But it was the intellectual tragedy of the nineteenth century that the discovery of organic evolution, instead of stimulating such a general love of humanity, seemed at first to show that it was for ever impossible. Progress, it appeared, had been always due to a ruthless struggle for life, which must still continue unless progress was to cease. Pity and love would turn the edge of the struggle, and therefore would lead inevitably to the degeneration of the species.
This grim conception of an internecine conflict, inevitable and unending, in which all races must play their part, hung for a generation after 1859 over the study of world-politics as the fear of a cooling sun hung over physics, and the fear of a population to be checked only by famine and war hung over the first century of political economy. Before Darwin wrote, it had been possible for philanthropists to think of the non-white races as 'men and brothers' who, after a short process of education, would become in all respects except colour identical with themselves. Darwin made it clear that the difficulty could not be so glossed over. Racial variations were shown to be unaffected by education, to have existed for millions of years, and to be tending perhaps towards divergence rather than assimilation.
The practical problem also of race relationship has by a coincidence presented itself since Darwin wrote in a sterner form. During the first half of the nineteenth century the European colonists who were in daily contact with non-European races, although their impulses and their knowledge alike revolted from the optimistic ethnology of Exeter Hall, yet could escape all thought about their own position by assuming that the problem would settle itself. To the natives of Australia or Canada or the Hottentots of South Africa trade automatically brought disease, and disease cleared the land for a stronger population. But the weakest races and individuals have now died out, the surviving population are showing unexpected powers of resisting the white man's epidemics, and we are adding every year to our knowledge of, and therefore our responsibility for, the causation of infection. We are nearing the time when the extermination of races, if it is done at all, must be done deliberately.
But if the extermination is to be both inevitable and deliberate how can there exist a community either of affection or purpose between the killers and the killed? No one at this moment professes, as far as I know, to have an easy and perfect answer to this question. The point of ethics lies within the region claimed by religion. But Christianity, which at present is the religion chiefly concerned, has conspicuously failed even to produce a tolerable working compromise. The official Christian theory is, apparently, that all human souls are of equal value, and that it ought to be a matter of indifference to us whether a given territory is inhabited a thousand years hence by a million converted Central African pigmies or a million equally converted Europeans or Hindus. On the practical point, however, whether the stronger race should base its plans of extension on the extermination of the weaker race, or on an attempt, within the limits of racial possibility, to improve it, Christians have, during the nineteenth century, been infinitely more ruthless than Mohammedans, though their ruthlessness has often been disguised by more or less conscious hypocrisy.
But the most immediately dangerous result of political 'Darwinism' was not its effect in justifying the extermination of African aborigines by European colonists, but the fact that the conception of the 'struggle for life' could be used as a proof that that conflict among the European nations for the control of the trade-routes of the world which has been threatening for the last quarter of a century is for each of the nations concerned both a scientific necessity and a moral duty. Lord Ampthill, for instance, the athletic ex-governor of Madras, said the other day: 'From an individual struggle, a struggle of families, of communities, and nations, the struggle for existence has now advanced to a struggle of empires.'[[114]]
The exhilaration with which Lord Ampthill proclaims that one-half of the species must needs slaughter the other half in the cause of human progress is particularly terrifying when one reflects that he may have to conduct negotiations as a member of the next Conservative Government with a German statesman like Prince Büllow, who seems to combine the teaching of Bismarck with what he understands to have been the teaching of Darwin when he defends the Polish policy of his master by a declaration that the rules of private morality do not apply to national conduct.
Any such identification of the biological advantage arising from the 'struggle for life' among individuals with that which is to be expected from a 'struggle of empires' is, of course, thoroughly unscientific. The 'struggle of empires' must either be fought out between European troops alone, or between Europeans in combination with their non-European allies and subjects. If it takes the first form, and if we assume, as Lord Ampthill probably does, that the North European racial type is 'higher' than any other, then the slaughter of half a million selected Englishmen and half a million selected Germans will clearly be an act of biological retrogression. Even if the non-European races are brought in and a corresponding number of selected Turks and Arabs and Tartars, or of Gurkhas and Pathans and Soudanese are slaughtered, the biological loss to the world, as measured by the percentage of surviving 'higher' or 'lower' individuals will only be slightly diminished.
Nor is that form of the argument much better founded which contends that the evolutionary advantage to be expected from the 'struggle of empires' is the 'survival' not of races but of political and cultural types. Our victory over the German Empire, for instance, would mean, it is said, a victory for the idea of political liberty. This argument, which, when urged by the rulers of India, sounds somewhat temerarious, requires the assumption that types of culture are in the modern world most successfully spread by military occupation. But in the ancient world Greek culture spread most rapidly after the fall of the Greek Empire; Japan in our own time adopted Western culture more readily as an independent nation than she would have done as a dependency of Russia or France; and India is perhaps more likely to-day to learn from Japan than from England.