Evolution & ethics and other essays / by Thomas H. Huxley.

  • Huxley Thomas Henry, 1825-1895.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution & ethics and other essays / by Thomas H. Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    V VIII 'I%c “ Times” December l^th, 1890 Sir,—If Mr. Ounningham doubts the efficacy of the struggle for existence, as a factor in social conditions, he should find fault with Mr. Booth and not with me. “ I am labouring under no delusion as to the possibility of inaugurating the millennium by my social specific. In the struggle of Hfe the weakest will go to the wall, and there are so many weak. The fittest in tooth and claw will survive. All that we can do is to soften the lot of the unfit, and make their suffering less horrible than it is at present ” (“ In Darkest England,” p. 44). That is what Mr. Cunningham would have found if he had read Mr. Booth’s book with attention. And, if he will bestow equal pains on my second letter, he will discover that he has interpolated the word “ wilfully ” in his statement of my “ argument,” which runs thus : “ Shutting his eyes to the necessary consequences of the struggle for life, the existence of which he admits as fully as any Darwinian, Mr. Booth tells men whose evil case is one of those consequences that envy is a corner-stone of our competitive system.”