The evening light. [volume] (San Antonio, Tex.) 1881-1883, 1882-02-25
DARWIN IN THE NEWSPAPERS.

The Galveston News IS adjusting
the unfinished Blaine business OF the
government, contradictory with the
Chicago Times. The latter goes back
on the ex-secretary, urges war as a
benefcence and applies the Darwlnlan
survival of the fittest'' as appropriate
doctrine. Here is the way in which
the Times puts its specific:
The one universal law" under
which all tribes and peoples have
emerged from primitive savagery INTO
barbarism, and from barbarism into
the lowest state of civilization, and
from that into the higher state OF CIVIL
ization, is the law of the survival OF the
fittest. In the struggle for existence,
the fittest to contend against the OBJ
stacles to existence have survived; TIE
unfit have persisted. The more Wig
orous have conquered the less vlgor-
Gus. The tribe which has shown its
superiority to other tribes in high
er social organization, a better habit of
discipline, more advanced mode OF
life, has subjugated its inferior neigh
bors, and, If they have not been capa-
bic of assimilation to the conquerors,
has exterminated them. In this way,
and in no other, nations have been
made and maintained the continuity OF
their political life in history
Now the News errs in conceding this
"theory in its broad sense or in any
other sense. The philosophy of the
"survival, &c." claimed as Darwinian
lies wholly in its being a peaceful pro-
cess in accord with nature. 1t is ma
ture preserves, perpetuates and dis
cards, and it can not be war. There
can be no zone universal law" which
operates a transition from barbarlsm
to civilization by means of violation
of all law. There is no superior fitness
for advancement in the arts of peace
preserved in the accidental SURVIVORS of
a bloody and destructive war. In all
the dispensations of war accident is
arbiter and chance destiny. If there
be progress it comes from the action
of the laws of mind on elements i'm
proved by discipline or warned by ad-
versity.
1t is the extrement fallacy to COM
pare the genesis of species by which
the laws of nature perpetually prepare,
improve, select, expel, material
in the factories of the universe
so as to produce in sue
cession the types of being, each in
turn higher than the last, with the in
discriminate, blind, cruelty of war.
The one is natures highest art, the
other her grossest wrong, and the des-
truction of all her art. One the per-
fiction of benefits, the other the per-
lection of injuries. There are no
similitudes. nor harmonies, nor resem-
dances between them, but instead of
these, discord and repulsion in every
part.
We are not in these remarks touch
ing the political question discussed by
the journals named, but maintaining
simply the inviolable right of nature in
her workshops to be spared the pro-
fame intrusion of an unwelcome and
unseemly guest, even though it come
but in the idle form of argument or as
sertion.
THERE is a religlo-phllosophlcal
moral resident in Chicago who in
culates the doctrines that every man is
entitled to have just what he wants,
but who proposes in a conservative
way to instruct the neophyte how he is
to want only what he ought to have.
Then there is philosopher, who pre-
walls also good deal in places outside
of Chicago, in police buttons, who