It is one of the commonplaces of biology that the nature of the organism (which is mainly determined by ancestral antecedents) is greatly more important in determining its future than the conditions of its environment, provided, of course, that these are not too cruelly abnormal, so that good seed will do better on rather poor soil, than bad seed on rather good soil; this alone should be enough to show that cunning, or individual effort, is more important in determining organic results than luck is, and therefore that if either is to be insisted on to the exclusion of the other, it should be cunning, not luck. Which is more correctly said to be the main means of the development of capital—Luck? or Cunning? Of course there must be something to be developed—and luck, that is to say, the unknowable and unforeseeable, enters everywhere; but is it more convenient with our oldest and best-established ideas to say that luck is the main means of the development of capital, or that cunning is so? Can there be a moment’s hesitation in admitting that if capital is found to have been developed largely, continuously, by many people, in many ways, over a long period of time, it can only have been by means of continued application, energy, effort, industry, and good sense? Granted there has been luck too; of course there has, but we let it go without saying, whereas we cannot let the skill or cunning go without saying, inasmuch as we feel the cunning to have been the essence of the whole matter.
Granted, again, that there is no test more fallacious on a small scale than that of immediate success. As applied to any particular individual, it breaks down completely. It is unfortunately no rare thing to see the good man striving against fate, and the fool born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Still on a large scale no test can be conceivably more reliable; a blockhead may succeed for a time, but a succession of many generations of blockheads does not go on steadily gaining ground, adding field to field and farm to farm, and becoming year by year more capable and prosperous. Given time—of which there is no scant in the matter of organic development—and cunning will do more with ill luck than folly with good. People do not hold six trumps every hand for a dozen games of whist running, if they do not keep a card or two up their sleeves. Cunning, if it can keep its head above water at all, will beat mere luck unaided by cunning, no matter what start luck may have had, if the race be a fairly long one. Growth is a kind of success which does indeed come to some organisms with less effort than to others, but it cannot be maintained and improved upon without pains and effort. A foolish organism and its fortuitous variation will be soon parted, for, as a general rule, unless the variation has so much connection with the organism’s past habits and ways of thought as to be in no proper sense of the word “fortuitous,” the organism will not know what to do with it when it has got it, no matter how favourable it may be, and it is little likely to be handed down to descendants. Indeed the kind of people who get on best in the world—and what test to a Darwinian can be comparable to this?—commonly do insist on cunning rather than on luck, sometimes perhaps even unduly; speaking, at least, from experience, I have generally found myself more or less of a failure with those Darwinians to whom I have endeavoured to excuse my shortcomings on the score of luck.