Lord Ampthill’s phrase, however, represents not so much an argument, as a habit of feeling shared by many who have forgotten or never known the biological doctrine which it echoes.  The first followers of Darwin believed that the human species had been raised above its prehuman ancestors because, and in so far as, it had surrendered itself to a blind instinct of conflict.  It seemed, therefore, as if the old moral precept that men should control their more violent impulses by reflection had been founded upon a mistake.  Unreflecting instinct was, after all, the best guide, and nations who acted instinctively towards their neighbours might justify themselves like the Parisian ruffians of ten years ago, by claiming to be ‘strugforlifeurs.’

If this habit of mind is to be destroyed it must be opposed not merely by a new argument but by a conception of man’s relation to the universe which creates emotional force as well as intellectual conviction.

And the change that has already shown itself in our conception of the struggle for life among individuals indicates that, by some divine chance, a corresponding change may come in our conception of the struggle between peoples.  The evolutionists of our own time tell us that the improvement of the biological inheritance of any community is to be hoped for, not from the encouragement of individual conflict, but from the stimulation of the higher social impulses under the guidance of the science of eugenics; and the emotional effect of this new conception is already seen in the almost complete disappearance from industrial politics of that unwillingly brutal ‘individualism’ which afflicted kindly Englishmen in the eighteen sixties.

An international science of eugenics might in the same way indicate that the various races should aim, not at exterminating each other, but at encouraging the improvement by each of its own racial type.  Such an idea would not appeal to those for whom the whole species arranges itself in definite and obvious grades of ‘higher’ and ‘lower,’ from the northern Europeans downwards, and who are as certain of the ultimate necessity of a ‘white world’ as the Sydney politicians are of the necessity of a ‘white Australia.’  But in this respect during the last few years the inhabitants of Europe have shown signs of a new humility, due partly to widespread intellectual causes and partly to the hard facts of the Russo-Japanese war and the arming of China.  The ’spheres of influence’ into which we divided the Far East eight years ago, seem to us now a rather stupid joke, and those who read history are already bitterly ashamed that we destroyed by the sack of the Summer Palace in 1859, the products of a thousand years of such art as we can never hope to emulate.  We are coming honestly to believe that the world is richer for the existence both of other civilisations and of other racial types than our own.  We have been compelled by the study of the Christian documents to think of our religion