Cunningham doubts the efficacy of the struggle for
existence, as a factor in social conditions, he should find fault with
Mr. Booth and not with me.
"I am labouring under no delusion as to the possibility of inaugurating
the millennium by my social specific. In the struggle of life the
weakest will go to the wall, and there are so many weak. The fittest
in tooth and claw will survive. All that we can do is to soften the
lot of the unfit, and make their suffering less horrible than it is at
present" ("In Darkest England," p. 44).
That is what Mr. Cunningham would have found if he had read Mr. Booth's
book with attention. And, if he will bestow equal pains on my second
letter, he will discover that he has interpolated the word "wilfully"
in his statement of my "argument," which runs thus: "Shutting his eyes
to the necessary consequences of the struggle for life, the existence
of which he admits as fully as any Darwinian, Mr. Booth tells men
whose evil case is one of those consequences that envy is a
corner-stone of our competitive system." Mr. [287] Cunningham's
physiological studies will have informed him that the process of
"shutting the eyes," in the literal sense of the words, is not always
wilful; and I propose to illustrate, by the crucial instance his own
letter furnishes, that the "shutting of the eyes" of the mind to the
obvious consequences of accepted propositions may also be involuntary.
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