It happened with Darwin's theory as it always happens with
theories having any bearing upon human relations. Instead of
widening it according to his own hints, his followers narrowed it
still more. And while Herbert Spencer, starting on independent
but closely allied lines, attempted to widen the inquiry into
that great question, "Who are the fittest?" especially in the
appendix to the third edition of the Data of Ethics, the
numberless followers of Darwin reduced the notion of struggle for
existence to its narrowest limits. They came to conceive the
animal world as a world of perpetual struggle among half-starved
individuals, thirsting for one another's blood. They made modern
literature resound with the war-cry of woe to the vanquished, as
if it were the last word of modern biology. They raised the
"pitiless" struggle for personal advantages to the height of a
biological principle which man must submit to as well, under the
menace of otherwise succumbing in a world based upon mutual
extermination. Leaving aside the economists who know of natural
science but a few words borrowed from second-hand vulgarizers, we
must recognize that even the most authorized exponents of
Darwin's views did their best to maintain those false ideas. In
fact, if we take Huxley, who certainly is considered as one of
the ablest exponents of the theory of evolution, were we not
taught by him, in a paper on the 'Struggle for Existence and its
Bearing upon Man,' that,

"from the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on
about the same level as a gladiators' show. The creatures are
fairly well treated, and set to, fight hereby the strongest, the
swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The