An acquaintance of mine in these seas took part in, and profited largely by, the removal to a distant place of the entire population of an island on which the people had led the usual life of the Polynesian.  He and his associates sold three hundred men to plantation labor, which they hated and to which they were unaccustomed.  Within a year two hundred and fifty of them had died as fast as disease could sap their grief-stricken bodies.  Their former home, which they died longing to see again, was made a feeding-place for sheep.  The merchants reaped a double toll.  They were paid well for delivering the owners of the land to the plantations, and in addition they got the land.

Now, my acquaintance is a man of university education, a quoter of Haeckel and Darwin, with “survival of the fittest” as his guiding motto since his Jena days.  Says he, quoting a Scotchman: 

“Tone it down as you will, the fact remains that Darwinism regards animals as going up-stairs, in a struggle for individual ends, often on the corpses of their fellows, often by a blood-and-iron competition, often by a strange mixture of blood and cunning, in which each looks out for himself and extinction besets the hindmost.”

Further says my stern acquaintance, specially when in his cups: 

“The whole system of life-development is that of the lower providing food for the higher in ever-expanding circles of organic existence, from protozoea to steers, from the black African to the educated and employing man.  We build on the ribs of the steers, and on the backs of the lower grade of human.”

Scientific books have taken the place of the Bible as a quotation-treasury of proof for whatever their reader most desires to prove.  Now I am no scientist and take, indeed, only the casual interest of the average man in the facts and theories of science.  But it appears to me that in his theory of the survival of the fittest my acquaintance curiously overlooks the question of man’s own survival as a species.

If we are to base our actions upon this cold-blooded and inhuman view of the universe, let us consider that universe as in fact inhuman, and having no concern for man except as a species of animal very possibly doomed to extinction, as many other species of animal have been doomed in the past, unless he proves his fitness to survive not as an individual, but as a species.

Now man is a gregarious animal; he lives in herds.  The characteristic of the herd is that within it the law of survival of the fittest almost ceases to operate.  The value of a herd is that its members protect each other instead of preying upon each other.  Nor, in what we are pleased to call the animal kingdom, do herds of the same species prey upon each other.  They rather unite for the protection of their weaker members.