Social evolution / by Benjamin Kidd.

  • Benjamin Kidd
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Social evolution / by Benjamin Kidd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    82/408 page 70
    CHAP. of our population have no sanction from their reason for maintaining existing conditions. When all due allowance is made for the misstatements and exag- gerations with which much of this kind of literature abounds, the evolutionist who understands his subject sees clearly enough that the main facts of the funda- mental constitution of society are therein represented with sufficient approximation to truthfulness to quite justify this conclusion. No greater mistake can be made than to suppose that the arguments of these writers have been effectively answered in that class of literature which is usually to be met with on the other side. What science has for the most part attempted to do—and what, as we shall see when we come to deal with socialism, she has not the least difficulty in succeeding in doing—is to prove that the constitution of society proposed by socialist writers could not be permanently successful, and that it must result in the ultimate ruin of any people adopt- ing it. But this is not a practical argument against socialism. No lesson of the past or of the present can be more obvious than that men never have been, and are not now, influenced in the least by the opinions of scientists or any other class of persons, however wise, as to what the result of present conduct, apparently cal- culated to benefit themselves, may be on generations yet unborn. “ How many workmen of the present day,” pertinently asks a recent writer, “ would refuse an annuity of two hundred pounds a year, on the chance that by doing so they might raise the rate of wages 1 per cent in the course of three thousand years ? ” But why talk of three thousand years ? he says. “ Our care as a matter of fact does not extend three hundred. Do any of us deny ourselves a single scuttle of coals so
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