It is obvious, therefore, that we are not yet done with the problem of population. It is always a serious matter in the great centres; it may, under very conceivable circumstances, be a fearful dilemma at no very distant date; and as the world becomes more thickly peopled it will more and more present itself as a pressing question. We cannot here, however, enter into a detailed discussion of the problem. It will probably always be a difficulty, and will call forth a variety of answers. But, as we have already said, no satisfactory and conclusive solution can be offered or expected by any one who understands the conditions of the problem. The solution must wait on the moral and social development of mankind. There is certainly no prospect of the question being materially affected by any physiological modification of the human constitution. We can only hope that the present progress of civilised countries in morality, intelligence, and in a reasonable standard of living, will continue; that the improvement in material and economic conditions will go hand in hand with ethical advancement; that the happiness of mankind will not be wrecked by the irrational and unrestrained gratification of a single passion. If the mass of the people remain as they are, ready to sacrifice their own happiness and that of posterity to animal instinct, the population question cannot be solved, and the best hopes of human progress must be unfulfilled.
For socialism, as we have explained it, it may be claimed that it gives the strongest guarantees that the difficulty will receive the best and most rational treatment. As socialism generally means the supremacy of reason and morals over the natural forces, so with reference to the population question it means that natural appetite should be controlled by nobler and more rational feelings and principles. Under a socialistic system every member of the community will be interested in this as in every other serious question. The general enlightenment and the social conscience will most powerfully co-operate with the light and the conscience of the individual to effect a reasonable and a beneficent solution, as far as possible.
But we must now return to the questions with which we started—the relation of socialism to the struggle for existence, and to social progress as dependent on the struggle for existence. As we have seen, the Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence has the widest application to human society and human history. But the struggle for existence is not the sole principle of social progress. Social progress proceeds from the interaction, the balance and harmony, of many principles. The general question of social development, in which that of progress is involved, must be regarded in the light of the following considerations. Only we must premise that they are not a contradiction of the Darwinian theory; they are to be taken as a complement of it, and a correction of the narrow and one-sided conception of the theory.
1. The political, social, and ethical development of mankind is largely a record of the endeavour to place the struggle for existence under regulation. Progress chiefly and supremely consists in the growing control of ethical principle over all the forms of selfishness, egotism, unscrupulousness, and cruelty called forth by such struggle. In other words, progress mainly consists in the growing supremacy of law, order, and morality over the excess of the self-regarding principle in which the individual struggle has its root. We do not say that this exhausts the meaning of the ethical development of man, but it is a most important aspect of it.
Thus the ethical factor is the decisive one in human progress, but it has advanced pari passu with the general social and political progress. We see it in the crudest and most elementary forms when man emerged from the darkness of pre-historic times, and it has gradually developed into a noble complex of ideals, informed by a growing knowledge and by widening sympathies. In short, human progress has been a continual effort towards the realisation of the true, the beautiful, and the good, in such measure as was attainable by each succeeding generation of the race.
Not that the struggle for existence is hereby abolished. The struggle, and the regulation of it too, are carried forward into a further stage of progress, to be continued on a higher social and ethical plane. The human struggle generally is on a higher plane than the animal one which Darwin describes. It is a struggle on the plane of an intelligence which never ceases to develop, amongst beings who pursue social and ethical aims with growing clearness and energy. If the results still fall so far below our aims, it is because our intelligence and means of performance, though enlarging, are still very imperfect.
What we call natural selection in the animal world is in human history transformed, elevated, and idealised; it becomes social selection. We may call it natural, if we please; only, we must remember the greatly altered character of the agents concerned in it. While at every stage we see moral and intellectual growth, we must particularly remember that the new society for which socialists strive will consist of associated free beings acting under the regulation and stimulus of high ethical and artistic ends and ideals.
Nothing, therefore, can be more narrow and one-sided than to consider the struggle for existence as the sole lever of human progress. Such one-sided insistence on the idea of struggle is to deny the whole ethical development of the world.
Socialism professes to continue and promote the ethical and social development which we have described; on a higher plane of progress than has hitherto been reached to place the natural economic powers operating in human destiny under the regulation of reason, moral principle, and ideals of beauty; to render technical and mechanical appliances, and all the material and economic factors underlying human life, subservient to the well-being of man in a way hitherto unattained; and so to achieve the ethical freedom of man and his rational supremacy over the world. The competitive system is the latest phase in the struggle for existence, and socialism is the latest theory for the regulation of it along the well-approved lines of human progress.