To postcolonialists, those who lived on the margins were called "the other." Just as, within a family, a man shared blood ties with his parents and children, forming the core of the family, while the woman who married into the family became the "other" connected to it.
The "other" in Maria's book referred to Ireland. Although it had merged into the United Kingdom of Britain, it was in fact continually exploited because of its position as "the other." Some Irish people who longed for a better life went to England to work, where they did almost exclusively menial labor.
While Malthus spoke at length about surplus labor in The Times, Erasmus Darwin expressed his own view in The Temple of Nature:
Across the globe rings out the cry: how life endures without end; Death is conquered, happiness survives; Mankind takes possession of the earth step by step, and young, renewed Nature conquers time.
Darwin wrote to express life's struggle. He likewise believed that a world of war was a vast slaughterhouse, an inevitable price of development. The same theory applied to the fiercely competitive world of trade.
No wonder his grandson Darwin could write a book like On the Origin of Species. Natural selection, survival of the fittest—living things competed with one another, and those able to adapt to nature were preserved. Yet it was not necessarily the strongest species that survived, but the ones that fit.
When the environment changed, creatures that had adapted to the previous environment had to continue changing. Otherwise, they would be eliminated for failing to adapt to the new one.
Those who could adapt to the battlefield might not adapt to peace, and those who could adapt to peace might not adapt to the battlefield. Neither of these environments had been created by nature;