"Social life, in this sense of playing the game fairly, has made man the
superior of the brutes he sprang from. There is nothing mysterious or
recondite about it.
"In order to work together men must understand one another. Therefore,
natural selection has picked out the intelligent for survival in the
social world; and in order to work together intelligent men must depend
on one another, abiding by their covenants.
"Therefore, again, natural selection has picked out what we call
Morality for survival in the social world. The whole further progress of
mankind would seem to hang upon the possibility that we can find a way
to limit and, if possible, to terminate wars between nations, for only
in that contingency can we hope to develop a social system in which a
supreme efficiency with a maximum of individual liberty can be combined
upon a working basis."
Application of the Facts.
"These are incontrovertible facts, and they find their application to
the existing European situation in various ways, the most important of
which will appear in the discovery that, valuable as conventions and
covenants of nation with nation may be, and intolerable as any violation
of them surely is, we cannot hope for general and unfailing observance
of them until the feeling of mankind and the whole attitude of the world
in respect to international as well as private conduct shall be that the
covenants and conventions shall become, in a degree, unnecessary.
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