ated tax; and owners of large areas of land have developed a strong inclination to subdivide and sell lands which they formerly were disposed to hoard and increase. The power given to the government to purchase lands where the owners have objected to the valuation for taxation purposes has not been widely exercised, but several very important and considerable compulsory purchases of estates have been made in cases where associations of persons wishing to take the land on perpetual lease have applied to the government for that purpose. The chief benefit of such examples, indeed, seems to have been in compelling owners either to use the land themselves or to offer it for sale to persons anxious to use it; but from the New-Zealand point of view this would appear to be almost if not quite equally desirable. Finally, the land tax has largely enabled the country to do without other taxes, which would necessarily have fallen more heavily upon the class of workers with small incomes, instead of being levied on the classes best able to bear them.

It yet remains to be seen whether evils may not lurk, as yet unnoticed, in the system, which may impair if not destroy its usefulness. One consequence which was predicted by its opponents, however, has not been found to follow upon the introduction of the system. It was said that capital would be withdrawn from the country, and that poverty and stagnation would result. No such result has followed up to this time. New Zealand, with its less than a million inhabitants, is to-day looked on as one of the soundest dependencies of the British empire; it continues to draw to it from the mother country as much capital as it can profitably use; its exports steadily increase; and its people, if not rich, are well-to-do and comfortable.

It may be said, indeed, that New Zealand has not accepted Henry George's doctrines as they were propounded by their author, and this is literally true. It is, however, also true that they have accepted the essential spirit of those doctrines, and, applying that spirit to the circumstances of their own country, are giving probably the most useful practical illustration of all that is best in them for the world's acceptance. No doctrine in economics yet propounded for the acceptance of humanity

has ever been found to be applicable in exactly the same form or to exactly the same extent under all circumstances, and this, it may be safely said, will prove emphatically true of the doctrine of the single tax. The single tax, like all other economic plans, is not an end, but only a means. The end must be the amelioration of the condition of the masses of the people, and the consequent prosperity and happiness of the great majority. In New Zealand the people and their leaders believe this to be secured by taxing wealth rather than comparative poverty; by giving every encouragement to those who will devote themselves to the cultivation of the land; and by throwing every obstacle in the path of those who would fain establish and promote the pernicious system of private landlordism, which everywhere tends to create and perpetuate class distinctions, with their long train of attendant evils.

In these respects New Zealand presents an object-lesson which can hardly fail to be of value to other countries, even if their conditions differ widely from her own. Her successes may be noted with advantage, her mistakes may be criticised with profit, in every free country and by all those who see that existing conditions are far from perfect in any part of the world, and that the safety as well as the advancement of society may depend largely upon the introduction of wise and, it may be, far-reaching reforms.

NATURAL SELECTION, SOCIAL SELECTION, AND

HEREDITY.

BY PROFESSOR JOHN R. COMMONS,

Of Syracuse University, N. Y.

HE term "natural selection" is a misnomer, as Darwin

TH himself perceived. It means merely survival. "Selec

tion" proper involves intention, and belongs to human reason. Selection by man we call artificial. Natural selection is the outcome of certain physical facts: 1. Environment: the complex of forces, such as soil, climate, food, and competitors. 2. Heredity: the tendency in offspring to follow the type of the parent. 3. Variation: the tendency to diverge from that type. 4. Over-population: the tendency to multiply offspring beyond the food supply. 5. Struggle for life: the effort to exclude others or to consume others. 6. Consciousness of kind: the tendency to spare and coöperate with offspring and others of like type. 7. Survival of the fittest: the victory of those best fitted to their environment by heredity, variation, numbers, and consciousness of kind.

These biological facts underlie human society, but a new factor enters with novel results. This is self-consciousness. Society is based not merely on consciousness of kind, as worked out by Professor Giddings, but peculiarly on individual self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness is a product of evolution, at first biological as explained by natural selection, and second, sociological. The biological character is the prolongation of infancy, i. e. the prolonged plastic and unfolding state of the brain. This makes possible a new kind of development unknown to the animal, namely, education. Education is preeminently a social activity. say education instead of environment. In natural selection there is a physical environment which presses upon individuals, and only those survive who are fitted to sustain this pressure. In social selection society enters between the individual and the physical environment, and, while slowly subordinating the

I

latter, transforms its pressure upon the individual, and he alone survives who is fitted to bear the social pressure. This pressure reaches the individual through the educational media of language and social institutions, especially the family, the state, and property. Institutions rest upon ideas and beliefs, and these are epitomized in language. Language in turn, by giving names to things and relations, and by thus transmitting to each individual the accumulated race experience, gradually brings him to the consciousness of himself. This is education.

But self-consciousness is at first only vague, capricious, and unprincipled. It grows by becoming definite, self-controlled, and conscientious; that is, more regardful both of its own higher self and of others. It thus develops into moral character, which we call personality. Personality is the final outcome of social selection. When once liberated it becomes a new selective principle to which all others are subordinated. What, then, are the social conditions which promote or retard the survival of personality?

It is a debated question where we shall place the dividing line between pre-social and social man. In view of what precedes we should look for that line at the point where selfconsciousness begins to throw about itself a social covering. This covering is private property. The former view that primitive property was common property is now nearly abandoned. The supposed village communities of free proprietors were really villages of slaves and serfs. The semblance of common property in primitive times belongs to the pre-social or gregarious stage, and differs but little from the common use of a given area by a colony of beavers.

Private property involves two facts: 1. Perception of enduring value in external objects; 2. Exclusive control and enjoyment of those objects. Its psychological basis is therefore self-consciousness, which is the knowledge not of an ab stracted and isolated self, but of self as related to external nature and human beings.

The first private property was animals and tools. Artificial selection begins with the domestication of animals. Soon it lays hold on man himself by means of social institutions, all of which originate as private property. The primitive social fam

ily was not a state of promiscuity nor even the voluntary pairing of animals and birds, but it was private property in women, beginning as wife-capture and becoming wife-purchase and polygamy. Natural selection, too, is transcended when cannibalism ceases. The self-conscious victor enslaves his enemy and reduces him to property. Next, government arises as private despotism, and with it the land becomes the property of the chief. Thus the family, the state, protracted industry, and the control of social opportunities begin with that artificial selection denoted by private property.

Property in its early forms means the domination of the powerful over the weak. Social institutions develop out of this primitive tyranny, where the caprice of owners crushes the personality of the masses, towards a state of equal rights and opportunities for all. The industrial classes emerge from slavery and serfdom into a wage system, which in turn is modified in the direction of fair wages, short hours, and security of employment-fundamental conditions for personal development.

The family has arisen from the private property of a despot to the mutual coöperation of lovers, and the woman becomes a person instead of a chattel. The legal successor of polygamy the slavery of women-is not monogamy, but prostitution, which is the wage system of the sexes, grounded on the subordinate position of women and their meagre opportunities for self-support. Government is passing into democracy, and property in land and capital is being hedged about by the police and taxing powers, or diffused and socialized in the interest of the personal equality of all.

Social evolution is therefore the evolution of freedom and opportunity, on the one hand, and personality, on the other. Without freedom and security there can be no free will and moral character. Without exalted personality there can be no enduring freedom. The educational environment, therefore, which develops personality must itself develop with freedom. The ruling ideas of justice, integrity, morality, must move in advance, else the personality of individuals will not survive the temptations of freedom. To what extent, therefore, can education modify the individual? The answer is to be sought in the problems of heredity and degeneration.