By the rigid political economy referred to, is meant that destruction and utilization of "useless mouths" which Mr.Darwin himself describes in his highly interesting "Journal of Researches."[207] He says: "It is certainly true, that when pressed in winter by hunger, they kill and devour their old women before they kill their dogs.

The boy being asked why they did this, answered, 'Doggies catch otters, old women no.' They often run away into the mountains, but they are pursued by the men and brought back to the slaughter-house at their own firesides." Mr.Edward Bartlett, who has recently returned from the Amazons, reports that at one Indian village where the cholera made its appearance, the whole population immediately dispersed into the woods, leaving the sick to perish uncared for and alone.
Now, had the Indians remained, undoubtedly far more would have died; as doubtless, in Tierra del Fuego, the destruction of the comparatively useless old women has often been the means of preserving the healthy and reproductive young.

Such acts surely must be greatly favoured by the stern and unrelenting action of exclusive "Natural Selection." In the same way that admiration which all feel for acts of self-denial done for the good of others, and tending even towards the destruction of the actor, could hardly be accounted for on Darwinian principles alone; for self-immolators must but rarely leave direct descendants, while the community they benefit must by their destruction tend, so far, to {193} morally deteriorate.

But devotion to others of the same community is by no means _all_ that has to be accounted for.

Devotion to the whole human race, and devotion to God--in the form of asceticism--have been and are very generally recognized as "good;" and the Author contends that it is simply impossible to conceive that such ideas and sanctions should have been developed by "Natural Selection" alone, from only that degree of unselfishness necessary for the preservation of brutally barbarous communities in the struggle for life.