Militarists were as enthusiastic as the Humanitarians, the Socialists as
the Capitalists. The Socialists were specially encouraged by Darwin's
insistence on the influence of environment. Perhaps the strongest moral
bulwark of Capitalism is the belief in the efficacy of individual
righteousness. Robert Owen made desperate efforts to convince England
that her criminals, her drunkards, her ignorant and stupid masses, were
the victims of circumstance: that if we would only establish his new
moral world we should find that the masses born into an educated and
moralized community would be themselves educated and moralized. The
stock reply to this is to be found in Lewes's Life of Goethe. Lewes
scorned the notion that circumstances govern character. He pointed
to the variety of character in the governing rich class to prove the
contrary. Similarity of circumstance can hardly be carried to a more
desolating dead level than in the case of the individuals who are born
and bred in English country houses, and sent first to Eton or Harrow,
and then to Oxford or Cambridge, to have their minds and habits formed.
Such a routine would destroy individuality if anything could. Yet
individuals come out from it as different as Pitt from Fox, as Lord
Russell from Lord Gurzon, as Mr Winston Churchill from Lord Robert
Cecil. This acceptance of the congenital character of the individual
as the determining factor in his destiny had been reinforced by the
Lamarckian view of Evolution. If the giraffe can develop his neck by
wanting and trying, a man can develop his character in the same way. The
old saying, 'Where there is a will, there is a way,' condenses Lamarck's
theory of functional adaptation into a proverb. This felt bracingly
moral to strong minds, and reassuringly pious to feeble ones. There was
no more effective retort to the Socialist than to tell him to reform
himself before he pretends to reform society. If you were rich, how
pleasant it was to feel that you owed your riches to the superiority
of your own character! The industrial revolution had turned numbers