Genre:

Regular Feature, Editorial, News-Commentary

Subjects:

Natural Law, Darwinism, Evolution

    Reports that Benjamin Waugh's newly founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has 'secured the quasi-conditional support of Mr. Herbert Spencer'. The 'great apostle of the doctrine, "let the devil take the hindmost"' and 'very Pope of laissez-faire' is quoted as saying that although 'by protecting the children of bad parents (who are on the average of cases themselves bad), there is some interference with the survival of the fittest, yet it is a defensible conclusion that in the social state philanthropic feeling may, to this extent, mitigate the rigour of the natural law'. (538)