competition, not merely for the commodities, but for the means of
existence. When the colony reached the limit of possible expansion,
the surplus population must be disposed of somehow; or the fierce
struggle for existence must recommence and destroy that peace, which
is the fundamental condition of the maintenance of the state of art
against the state of nature.

Supposing the administrator to be guided by purely scientific
considerations, he would, like the gardener, meet this most serious
difficulty by systematic extirpation, or exclusion, of the superfluous.
The hopelessly diseased, the infirm aged, the weak or deformed in body
or in mind, the excess of infants born, would be put away, as the
gardener pulls up defective and superfluous plants, or the breeder
destroys undesirable cattle. Only the strong and the healthy,
carefully matched, with a view to the progeny best adapted to the
purposes of the administrator, would be permitted to perpetuate their
kind.

[22]


VIII.

Of the more thoroughgoing of the multitudinous attempts to apply the
principles of cosmic evolution, or what are supposed to be such, to
social and political problems, which have appeared of late years, a
considerable proportion appear to me to be based upon the notion that
human society is competent to furnish, from its own resources, an
administrator of the kind I have imagined. The pigeons, in short, are
to be their own Sir John Sebright.* A despotic government, whether