In the light of this conception let us examine more fully the relation of morality to the competitive struggle between individuals and communities. There can, of course, be no doubt that competition forces life up in the scale. But it is equally true, and more significant, that in the course of that progress competition itself is steadily eliminated. The stronger units of life prevail against the weaker. But the stronger units of life are the more inclusive and harmonious complexes of interest.

They are constituted by adjusting interests; allowing each a modicum of free play, or crushing those that will not submit to organization. Within such units the principle of mechanical survival gives way to the principle of moral survival. I mean by this that {25} the selection, rejection, and gradation of interests is made not on the basis of the uncompromising self-assertion of each and the survival of the hardy remnant; but on the basis of the contribution made by each to the life of the collective body. The test of survival is obedience to a law defined in the joint interest of all, and control is vested in the rational capacity to represent this interest and conduct it to a safe and profitable issue. The strength of life thus organized lies in its massiveness, in its effective plenitude. When such units wage war on one another, this strength is wasted; and the very same principle that strength shall prevail, tends to the extension of the organization until it shall embrace contentious factions.

Even where the principle of survival does not operate, conflict has been, and yet remains, a factor in moral progress of enormous and far-reaching importance. The more keen and unrelenting it is, the more effectually does it expose the weakness of the competing units, the more urgently does it require a better concentration and economy of effort. In order to fight a rival, it is necessary to leave off fighting one's self, and be healthy and single-minded. An industrial corporation, in order to overreach its competitors, is compelled to adjust its intricate functions with incredible nicety, to utilize by-products, and even to introduce old-age pensions for the promotion {26} of morale among its employees. And so a nation, to be strong in war, must enjoy peace and justice at home. War has served society by welding great aggregates of interest into compact and effective wholes, the enemy providing an object upon which collective endeavor can unite.

But circumstances that press life forward will be left behind, if these circumstances are not themselves good. And war is not that for which men war; they war for the existence and satisfaction of their interests. That which is constructive and saving in war is not the contact between the warring parties, but their internal coherence and harmony. It is that which survives when hostility is inhibited by a recognition of the cost; it is that which is extended when hostility gives way to a wider co-ordination of interests.

The loss when contending currents are redirected and flow together is not a loss of power, but only of neutralizing resistance. It is true that the lesson of harmony is learned through discord; but harmony is none the less in the end exclusive of discord. The principle of peace, learned at home through the hard necessity of war abroad, finds only a more complete justification and beneficent application in peace abroad. It is love and not hate that is the moving spring of life. It is love which is constructive; hate destroys even the very object that evokes and {27} sustains it. It is essential, then, to life, not only to assert and reproduce itself, but to increase itself through allying itself with life. Where the motive of life thus freely expresses itself, there are no natural enemies.

I count it to be important thus to trace morality back to the original love of life, since only so is it possible to understand its urgency, and its continuity with every organic impulse. It is because morality is without warrant dislocated from the natural life, that it is accused of being barren and formal. To many minds it is best symbolized by the kindly lady who gives the small boy a penny, and admonishes him not to spend it. But there could be no more outrageous travesty. Morality in its springs is absolutely one with that clinging to life which is the most deep-lying of all interests, and with that relish for life in which its goodness needs no philosopher's approval. The primal determination to be and to sell one's self dearly, is not different, except in its limits, from the moral determination to be and to attain to the uttermost. The whole force of life is behind every moral scruple, and guarantees the sanity even of a universal good-will.

But the identification of morality with the organization of life, serves also to demonstrate life in its unity and larger auspices. Morality harmonizes life and eliminates its wanton {28} self-destruction; but life is not therefore left without an object of conquest. For there is one campaign in which all interests are engaged, and which requires their undivided and aggressive effort. This is the first and last campaign, the war of life upon the routine of the mechanical cosmos and its forces of dissolution. To live, to let live, and to grow in life, constitute an absorbing and passionate task, in which every human heroism may find a proper object.