point, the last great effort of the emergent proletariat to destroy, not
alone the industrial civilization it justly detested, but the very
government it had acquired by "peaceful penetration" and organized and
administered along its chosen lines, and indeed the very fabric of
society itself.

Now these two remarkable products of the new mentality of a social force
were facts, but they needed an intellectual or philosophical
justification just as a low-born profiteer, when he has acquired a
certain amount of money, needs an expensive club or a coat of arms to
regularize his status. Protestantism and materialistic philosophy were
joint nursing-mothers to modernism, but when, by the middle of the last
century, it had reached man's estate, they proved inadequate; something
else was necessary, and this was furnished to admiration by
evolutionism. Through its doctrine of the survival of the fittest, it
appeared to justify in the fullest degree the gospel of force as the
final test, and "enlightened self-interest" as the new moral law;
through its lucid demonstration of the strictly physical basis of life,
the "descent of man" from primordial slime by way of the lemur or the
anthropoid ape, and the non-existence of any supernatural power that had
devised, or could determine, a code of morality in which certain things
were eternal by right, and other than the variable reactions of very
highly developed animals to experience and environment, it had given
weighty support to the increasingly popular movement towards democracy
both in theory and in act.

Its greatest contribution, however, was its argument that, since the
invariable law of life was one of progressive evolution, therefore the
acquired characteristics which formed the material of evolution, and
were heritable, could be mechanically increased in number by education;