Turn to the suspension of the cruder physical struggle which takes place in the evolution of tribal or national solidarity. As such national organisation becomes stronger and more skilful the ravages of intestine strife, starvation, and certain diseases cease to be selective instruments, and the kind of individual fitness which was tested by them is superseded; the vast expenditure of individual energy formerly engaged in protecting life and in securing necessaries of life is reduced to insignificant dimensions; but the struggle for individual life is not abated, it is simply shifted on to higher planes than that of bare animal existence, nourishment, and propagation. Instead of struggling for these simpler vital ends, individuals now struggle with all the extra energy spared from the earlier struggles for other ends of an enlarged and more complex life, for comfort and wealth, for place and personal honour, for skill, knowledge, character, and even higher forms of self-expression, and for services to their fellow-men, with whom they have identified themselves in that expanded individuality we term altruism or public spirit.
Individuality does not suffer but greatly gains by the suppression of the lower struggle; there is more energy, greater scope for its expression, a wider field of close competitors; and higher and more varied forms of fitness are tested and evoked. It is not even true that the struggle ceases to be physical; the strain and the support of the higher forms of struggle, even in the topmost intellectual and moral planes, are largely physical; the health and nervous energy which take part in the struggles of the law or literature or on any intellectual arena are chief requisites if not the supreme determinant of success. In all the higher forms of struggle an elimination of the physically unfit is still maintained, though the criteria