And again, is it true that evolution works constantly for good and promises to bring about such a millennium? It is doubtless true that evolution means progress, and the ever-increasing development of the more and more complex and differentiated from the simple and uniform. But is this all for good, or all for happiness; and is not evolution, like everything else, subject to the primary and all-pervading law of polarity? We have only to ask the question to answer it. In the case of the individual, which is the epitome of the history of the species, is development from the engaging innocence of childhood always in the direction of goodness and happiness?
So far is this from being the case that, as individuals and societies advance, and become higher and more complex in the scale of organisation, the law of polarity asserts itself with ever-increasing force, and contrasts become sharper. The good become better, the bad worse; and as we become less
Like the beasts with lower pleasures,
Like the beasts with lower pains,
if our happiness becomes more intense, so does our misery become more intolerable. I refer not merely to physical conditions, though here the contrast is most apparent. An intelligent traveller who recently circled the world, surveying mankind with a keen and impartial eye ‘from China to Peru,’ says, as the result of his experience, ‘The traveller will not see in all his wanderings so much abject repulsive misery among human beings in the most heathen lands, as that which startles him in his civilised Christian home, for nowhere are the extremes of wealth and poverty so painfully presented.’ This is perfectly true; but it would be a rash conclusion to infer that civilised and Christian countries are worse than heathen lands, or that those who march in the van of progress and succeed in the struggle for life, have a larger dose of original sin than the laggards and those who fail.
Accumulations of population and accumulations of capital are alike causes and effects of progress in an industrial age. But you can no more have a north without a south pole, than you can have this progress without its counterpart of suffering. When an educated gentleman was, like the good vicar,
Passing rich with forty pounds a year,
how many struggles and how many heart-aches were avoided. When ‘merry England’ dwelt in rural hamlets and villages, the ‘bitter cry’ of East London could scarcely have been written. Turn it as you like, increase of population means increase of poverty. Say that only five per cent. fail in the battle of life, from their own or inherited faults; from bad luck, ill-health, weakness of mind, adverse surroundings; five per cent. on thirty millions is a larger figure than five per cent. on ten millions. And the lot of those who fail is aggravated by the success of those who succeed. The scale of living rises, and the cost of living increases, while competition becomes keener. Increase of population in a limited area means increased difficulty of finding employment; and the complex relations of international commerce send panics and crises vibrating throughout the world, which throw millions out of work, or reduce them to starvation wages. In simple forms of society every one accepts the condition in which he finds himself as a matter of course, while in a more complex civilisation the fiend Envy steps in, and teaches the baser natures who are failures, to regard every success as an insult and every successful man as an enemy. Hence Labour rises in mad revolt against Capital; Socialists attack society with dynamite; and Utopian theorists preach a millennium to be attained by abolishing private property and individual liberty.
If we turn to the moral aspects of the question, it is still more clear that evolution does not tend solely to the side of virtue. There is doubtless less ferocious savagery, less rude and unconscious or half-conscious crime, in civilised societies, but there is far more deliberate and diabolical wickedness. The very temptations and opportunities which, if resisted, lead to higher virtues, if succumbed to, lead to greater vice. Even the intellectual advance, if perverted, becomes the instrument of greater crimes. A chemist discovers nitro-glycerine, and dynamite becomes a resource of civilisation. There is a saying that there is ‘no blackguard so bad as a Scotch blackguard,’ which, as a patriotic Scotchman, I take to be a tribute to the generally high intellectual and moral character of my countrymen. A powerful polarity is powerful, as the case may be, either for good or evil. Why then should we believe that evolution, which, carried thus far, has developed more strongly the contrast between good and evil, will, if carried a little farther, extinguish it by annihilating the evil?
In fact, the good and evil resulting from the higher evolution of society are so equally balanced that it depends very much on place, time, and temperament whether we are optimists or pessimists. If my liver acts properly I am an optimist; if it is out of order, a pessimist. Personally I incline to optimism—that is, I think that this world, if not exactly ‘the best of all possible worlds,’ is yet on the whole a very tolerable world, and that life to the majority, and on the average, is worth living. I think also that progress is certainly towards higher, and very probably towards happier, conditions. It seems to me that in the most advanced English-speaking communities, the condition of at least one half—viz. the female half—of the population is distinctly better, and that the working class, who form the majority of the male half, though many are worse off than formerly, are, on the whole, better fed, better clothed, better educated, and better behaved.