“…Then follows “Struggle for Existence,”— a principle which we experimentally know to be true and cogent,— bringing the comfortable assurance, that man, even upon Leviathan Hobbes’s theory of society, is no worse than the rest of creation, since all Nature is at war, one species with another, and the nearer kindred the more internecine,-bringing in thousand-fold confirmation and extension of the Malthusian doctrine, that population tends far to outrun means of subsistence throughout the animal and vegetable world, and has to be kept down by sharp preventive checks; so that not more than one of a hundred or a thousand of the individuals whose existence is so wonderfully and so sedulously provided for ever comes to anything, under ordinary circumstances; so the lucky and the strong must prevail, and the weaker and ill-favored must perish;— and then follows, as naturally as one sheep follows another, the chapter on “Natural Selection,” Darwin’s cheval de bataille, which is very much the Napoleonic doctrine, that Providence favors the strongest battalions, that, since many more individuals are born than can possibly survive, those individuals and those variations which possess any advantage, however slight, over the rest, are in the long run sure to survive, to propagate, and to occupy the limited field, to the exclusion or destruction of the weaker brethren. All this we pondered, and could not much object to. In fact, we began to contract a liking for a system which at the outset illustrates the advantages of good breeding, and which makes the most “of every creature’s best.”…”
“,so the lucky and the strong must prevail, and the weaker and ill-favored must perish;…”
The strong prevail, the weak perish - can you think of any way to dispute this?