even the wisest and best to agree. Witness the battle between those intellectual giants, Macaulay and John Stuart Mill, after which the forces of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy stood as before. Indeed, the general residuum of such contests inclines to the dictum that the form of government best adapted to a people is to be found by experiment, which to a conservative means the one in which they are at any time placed. And this does not militate against the doctrine of evolution, for every state of society is merely a point in the path of development, to be left when the evolutionary forces compel an onward movement. The materialistic school of evolutionists of which Herbert Spencer is the head, does not admit of a spiritual or rational principle in the cosmos, but that every manifestation of life and organization is the result of the blind interaction of matter and motion and of course without design or purpose. Their essential and controlling principle that the fittest survive, is alike applicable to human and to brute, and being a law of nature is a sufficient warrant for anything that takes place. With such fatalistic people, what ought or ought not to be, is only an academic question; as a stimulus to action for the removal of obstacles in the upward path, is irrelevant; whatever is, is right; at least it is irremediable. Is it not enough to say that the tendency of such teaching is to deter human effort and therefore bring on inertia which by a law of nature produces decay? Of course the fittest survive. Who does n't know that that is a bald truism? and that the crucial question is, How to become fit? Is it by lying supinely and muttering ': Do what we may, the mills of the gods grind on regardless either of our aid or our hindrance?" That seemed to be the predicament of Edward L. Youmans, the ablest and most active promoter of Spencerianism in America, as related by Henry George in his "Perplexed Philosopher."
