the securing of an orderly social life by maintaining these conditions, very few see that their further function, and in one sense more important function, is that of fitting men to fulfil these conditions spontaneously. The two functions are inseparable. From the biological laws we have been contemplating, it is, on the one hand, an inevitable corollary that, if these conditions are maintained, human nature will gradually adapt itself to them; while, on the other hand, it is an inevitable corollary that, by no other discipline than subjection to these conditions, can fitness to the social state be produced. Enforce these conditions, and adaptation to them will continue. Relax these conditions, and by so much there will be a cessation of the adaptive changes. Abolish these conditions, and, after the consequent social dissolution, there will commence (unless they are reestablished) an adaptation to the conditions then resulting—those of savage life. These are conclusions from which there is no escape, if man is subject to the laws of life in common with living things in general.
It may, indeed, be rightly contended that, if those who are but little fitted to the social state are rigorously subjected to these conditions, evil will result; intolerable restraint, if it does not deform or destroy life, will be followed by violent reaction. We are taught by analogy, that greatly-changed conditions from which there is no escape fail to produce adaptation because they produce death. Men having constitutions fitted for one climate, cannot be fitted to an extremely-different climate by persistently living in it, because they do not survive, generation after generation. Such changes can be brought about only by slow spreadings of the race through intermediate regions having intermediate climates, to which successive generations are accustomed little by little. And doubtless the like holds mentally. The intellectual and emotional natures required for high civilization are not to be obtained by forcing on the completely-uncivilized the needful activities and restraints in unqualified forms: gradual decay and death, rather than adaptation, would result. But so long as a society's institutions are indigenous, no danger is to be apprehended from a too-strict maintenance of the conditions to the ideally-best social life; since there can exist neither the required appreciation of them nor the required appliances for enforcing them. Only in those abnormal cases where a race of one type is subject to a race of much-superior type, is this qualification pertinent. In our own case, as in the cases of all societies having populations approximately homogeneous in character, and having institutions evolved by that character, there may rightly be aimed at the greatest rigor possible. The merciful policy, no less than the just policy, is that of insisting that these all-essential requirements of self-support and non-aggression shall be conformed to—the just policy, because failing to protect the better or more-adapted natures against the worse or less-adapted; the merciful policy, because the pains accompanying the process of adaptation to the social state must be gone through, and it
