THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 1909. FIFTY YEARS OF DARWINISM.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9567, 13 August 1909, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 1909. FIFTY YEARS OF DARWINISM.

It :s fifty' years since the publication of Darwin's great book, "The Origin of Species by Means ot Natural Selection," which has unfolded to mankind the mode, at any rate, in which progress upward and onward is made by all the manifold forms of organic life. It is surely not without significance that the fifty years which have elapsed since civilised humanity became aware of the machinery w iich Nature uses to secure the production of the fittest, have witaessed an unprecedented development by man himself of the means by which he has raised himself in power and intelligence. Within the last fifty years education has become the right of the many instead of being the privilege of the few. Steam and electricity have been harnessed for the service of humanity. Man has taught himself how to "burrow beneath the bastion of the brine" in a submarine, and how to fly across the "cruel, salt, estranging sea" in an aeroplane. He can send his thoughts across 3,000 miles of ocean without the intervention of a material means of communication, and can even transmit the sound of his Voice across considerable distances by wireless telephone. He has provided himself with weapons of attack that makes the fabled thunderbolts of Jove's insignificant by .comparison. He can produce mysterious rays that enable him to see his own perfectly articulated skeleton through its clothirg of flesh. By the discovery of radium he has been able to date back the beginnings of the earth that he lives on for a thousand million years of • unrecorded time, and thereby to gain some inkling of the age long processes of his own development. All this and much more, he has accomplished within the last fifty years, since Charles Darwin made it plain that success, as well as survival, belongs to the "fittest." A survey ot the astonishing achievements of mankind since Darvin disclosed the inner machinery of evolution, seems to suggest that the realisation of Nature's methods, has prompted mankind consciously to imitate them. And hence the unparalleled rapidity of the progress trat man j

l ias made in equipping himself with all the arts of war and peace for the j struggle that leads always to new ; heights. A glance backward shows ' ■ that the pace of development has | been enormously accelerated within the last decade or two. The motor i car, the submarine, the aeroplane , and dirigible airship, wireless telegraphy, radium and the X-rays, are all inventions that have been achieved within the last few years. And since each new invention suggests another still more startling, the number may be expected to increase in geometrical progression and vith evor-acctk-rating speed. Unhappily, a vast and ir.deed perhaps a preponderating amount of the ability of inventors is directed towards the production of new methods of conducting warfare by land and sea and air. At the same time, it is possible to see a few gleams ot hope. The movement in favour of international arbitration, the growing force of international public opinion, the tendency to find a peaceful settlement tor untoward "incidents," such as the Doggerbank episode, between England and Russia, and the Casablanca quarrel between France and Germany, are an symptomatic of a genuine development in the moral sphere, that may seem curiously inconsistent with the mad competition ' between rival nations for the possesjsion of overwhelming armaments, J I and, nevertheless, is too clear a fact ! to be explained away. The measure lof advance in this respect that has I been made during the last half cen- | tury or thereabouts may be estimated by comparing, say, Lord Palmerstom's blusterous' handling of: a delicate situation like that created with China by the Lorcha Arrow incident in 1857—two years before the publication of the "Origin of Species" —with the late Marquis of Salisbury's handling of the Fashoda incident, in which France was the prospective enemy, or of the Venezuela crisis, when Mr Grover Cleveland's imy'etuosity brought the United States into measurable distance of war with England. Under the Palmerstonian reeima such an incident as occurred a few weeks ago, when tiie British steamer Woodburn was fired upon by the excitable captain of a Russian torpedo boat guarding the Czar's yacht Standart, would have involved England almost inevitably in a,war s with Russia. At the present time it is recognised that regrettable incidents of that kind are not a ground for engaging in a bloodthirsty war involving millions of people who'had nothing to do with them. The moral sense of some statesmen acting in their public capacity may appear to be stiill considerably lower than the moral sense which guides their conduct as private individuals. But it is improving slowly, and who shall say that the time is not coming when moral influences and the principles of abstrict justice will supersede that material torce which is still unhappily the "ultima ratio.'' The development of the moral sense in international relations may be slow, but it is not less sure than even the evolution of death-dealing armaments. How much or how little of the moral and material progress that civilised mankind has made during the fifty years of Darwinism is due to Charles Darwin's teaching may be a mattor for argument. But it may perhaps be fiuggested, without undue fancifulness, that the widespread consciousness of the inspiring doctrine that all life is one long struggle towards perfection, must still be animating those master minds in every sphere of achievement that are striving to win new victories for men over the forces of Nature, and also new victories for him over his own baser tendencies, the characteristics which still drag him earthward. Even in the sphere of material progress there are discoveries to be made which are likely to revolutionise the conditions of life on this planet. It U true that the probabilicies at present seenii to point to terrible international collisions; and it may be tnat in sober fact armageddon must precede the millennium, hut there is a soul of good in all things evil if only we can "observingly (ii.-.;il it out," and the human thought which Darwin stimulated 50 years hy his explanation of Nature's mode' of effecting progress, may lead in time to siich perfection of the instruments of destruction that humanity will ;be compelled to put an end to war lest it blot itself out of existence.