Review of Periodicals

A noteworthy analysis of Rousseau's theory of the state. The writer brings to his task an ideal equipment as an able historian of political thought. He says:— "Rousseau thus contributed largely to pro mote the theory of the national state. His main purpose, however, was apart from this. Consciously he aimed only to devise a theory of sovereignty through which liberty and authority should be reconciled. His meta physics and psychology, however ingenious, were not, as we have seen, equal to the task. He could offer no self-consistent reasoning by which it should appear that an indi vidual's will was certain to be expressed in the general will, except in the same sense in which the individual's will was certain to be expressed in the will of a monarch to whom he had submitted himself. Rousseau failed, in short, to prove that the sovereignty of the community was any more compatible with individual liberty than the sovereignty of a monarch or an oligarchy. But his earnest and confident declamation about the virtues of the general will and the significance of the general interest brought those concepts into the foreground of political theory, and evoked from more subtle reasoners than Rousseau more refined and self-consistent solutions of the problem he propounded. If their results were ultimately no more successful than his, that was due rather to the a priori conceptions of liberty and authority that were the common basis of this whole school of speculation than to any flaw in the logic by which the deduc tions from these conceptions were made. The assumption that true and perfect liberty could be predicted of only the non-social man was fatal to any theory of political authority. Nothing could come out of this assumption save the empty paradoxes of Rousseau, the paralyzing transcendentalism of Kant, Fichte and Hegel, Rousseau's legitimate successors, or anarchy pure and simple. ... In the eighteenth century the Aristotelian way of approaching politics made small appeal to intellectual men, and least of all to Rousseau." "Darwinism and Politics." By Sidney Low. Fortnightly Review, v. 86, p. 519 (Sept.). An article on "The Cult of the Unfit" was published in the Fortnightly Review for August and was treated by the Green Bag at the time as deserving more than passing notice (see 21 Green Bag, 459, 477) . The writer, Mr. IwanMtiller, endeavored to apply the Darwinian theory to the problems lacing the modern state, and condemned what he called the "cult of the unfit" as illustrated by such legis lation as the Old Age Pensions Act, and "as translated into practice by the present Chan cellor of the Exchequer." The article was a vigorous plea for the natural competition of human society as something to be preferred to artificial attempts to place mediocrity and inefficiency in a more favored position than that in which they find themselves under the operation of normal social forces. The con clusions of this article were substantially

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sound though they might perhaps call for modification in some minor particulars. Mr. Sidney Low now enters the arena with an article in the same review in which he assails Mr. Iwan-Muller's position with an ardor that suggests partisan energy more strongly than scientific zeal. He thinks that the struggle for the survival of the fittest, as portrayed by Mr. Iwan-Mtiller, would not only be brutalizing but that it would be de structive of society itself, association being as strong a characteristic of the race as compe tition, and the protection of the weak by the strong being as natural a phenomenon as the survival of the fittest. Mr. Low conducts this argument with much brilliancy and resource fulness. This is properly not a subject for lay dis cussion. Nothing but skillful scientific in vestigation can throw much light on the actual relations between the egoistic and the altruistic activities of mankind and the forces which act upon them and determine to what extent one set of functions shall predominate over the other. Mr. Low is at a disadvantage in this controversy in that he probes a problem which Mr. Iwan-Mtiller for the most part wisely avoided. Mr. Iwan-Mtiller did not exalt the law of self-preservation above every thing else, or fail to see the complexity of the concept of fitness, which may be made up in part of altruistic elements. Mr. Low, on the contrary, appears to think that self-preserva tion is nothing and that philanthropy is everything. The action of the individual in relation to the race is in part associated, in part disso ciated. Association for protection and de fense has come down from prehistoric times. With the triumph over the enemies of the com munity, the usefulness of association for other purposes, beyond the underlying purposes of the family and community which are at the bottom of our civilization, has made man a more social animal than he appeared to Aristotle. It is very easy for a temperament prone to accept socialistic distortion of facts, deceived by the phenomena of association everywhere visible, to be blinded to the individualistic forces at work in society. The natural competition of individuals has been in no way removed by association, nor can association ever insure a livelihood to the weak even though its ten dency is obviously to make life easier for the whole community. It is a melancholy fact that the weakest must generally suffer. Humanitarian enthusiasts like Mr. Low, in urging that the strong should help the weak, are apt to forget that the strength of the strong is limited, and that their strength will not admit of their aiding all the weak, nor in fact of their aiding even the few found spe cially deserving. The combined resources of a great nation, tremendous as they are, are insufficient to wipe out all the poverty and suffering which are nature's penalties for illadaptation. Mr. Low's view that the fittest to exist are not the morally fittest is by no means pro found. The survival of the fittest, every one ought to admit, may mean the survival of