THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST
The Laws of Nature Determine Who Shall Live, and Who Shall Die
The theory of the survival of the fittest is agitating the world more than ever before. But it has changed its significant title to what is known now as “Eugenics,” which means substantially “well born,” or good birth.
Briefly speaking, it is claimed that it is a law of nature that the weakest shall go to the wall, and that the strongest shall survive. In carrying out this doctrine, the ancient nations, Sparta, for example, put to death all the weak and decrepit children, permitting only the strong and well-shaped physically to live.
In our day, the scientists, or rather those who claim to be scientific, advocate the same practice in a different but equally as effective a manner.
The doctrine of “selection,” as it is termed, has been invented to cover up the Spartan tragedy of murdering the helpless, and by it, it is hoped our admitted degeneracy will be stopped.
I do not apply the term “degeneracy” to the Colored people, because degeneracy works back to a type and not away from it in the human family. The average Colored American is too near the pure type of his race to be in a very deep degeneracy, but the word must be applied to the mixed races of the Aryan, Caucasian, of whom it would be vain to find a pure type except among the Georgians of Asia.
In explaining the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, or eugenics, to give it its modern name, it is said that those who fail in life, fail because they are not fitted to succeed, that is they are not “fit.” This is called a law of nature. It is purposed to overcome this law of nature, by selecting the parents by a medical examination or other process, and confine parentage to them exclusively.
In other words, to prevent humanity from becoming any worse than it is, the people who are to marry and bear children shall be of the very best and highest type, and then their children will be finely developed and make perfect citizens and become parents to other children.
But where shall we begin and what is the type aimed to reach as the standard? It is important to the Colored man to know the meaning of this movement to better the race, and also to discover what race is to be the standard of excellence.
An effort will be made to explain as clearly as possible.
Who are the strongest that shall be permitted to survive, and who are the weakest whose death knell is sounded?
It must be borne in mind in the outset, that all this controversy is among the Caucasian, or as it is called in other places of this book, the “Aryan” race, or division of the human family. It has not yet reached the Colored race, nor has it been applied to them particularly. Hence, let the Colored man stand outside and look on with interest, and also watch that the theory does not spread to his race.
A man who lives in the slums is unfit to live anywhere else, so it is said. A man who has made a million by a turn in the stock market, lives in a palace, but can only write his name to a check, and can not tell a spade from a rake. J. Pierpont Morgan possessed boundless wealth and tremendous power in the financial world. Walt Whitman, the humane poet, had a small competence and no power at all except to touch the hearts of mankind. Burns was a plowman; Bunyan a tinker; a writer of slang and jokesmith, makes a million; Brigham Young was a prophet and a ruler, wealthy and honored; Stevenson was in the last stages of tuberculosis; Byron was a cripple; Johnson was a glutton, and the composer of a silly ragtime waltz owns an automobile and keeps a valet and a chauffeur.
Which of these shall we select as the type, and how are we going to tell whether the offspring of our selections will come up to the type?
Modern medical scientists declare in the most positive terms, that every child is born free from infectious diseases, and at the moment of its birth is a perfect type. That the first breath it draws fills it with the germs of future diseases that tend to make it a weak and diseased abortion of humanity. All its troubles come from its surroundings or environments, which are the conditions it must meet and with which it must struggle to live at all.
It may avoid future disease from the infecting germs it breathes at the moment of birth, by making its environments better, purer and altering the bad conditions under which it lives.
We know, because we can see it every day, that of two plants or animals, that one will survive which is the fittest to endure the conditions in which both exist. He, the man, or it, the plant, can be afforded opportunities in the way of good food, care, and proper training, to resist the encroachments of disease and degenerate conditions.
Hence, we may say, that the question of which man shall survive, depends upon the conditions under which he shall struggle for survival.
There is no law of nature here, it is the law of common sense and good government. We are surrounded by conditions best suited for strength and survival, and the conditions which promote weakness, disease and degeneracy are removed or beyond our reach.
In a nation of marauders or robbers, those who live by spoliation and the sword, would be the fittest to survive, and they would be a different type of men from those who get first place in a nation of traders, where fierceness and strength are less called for than tenacity of purpose and clearness of head.
When a man says he is poor, somebody says, that man is poor because he is not fitted to gain wealth. But we say, he is not fitted to gain wealth under the conditions of his life. Take him out of those conditions, put opportunities in his way and he becomes “fit” because he gains wealth. It is done every day.
One condition of society enables one kind of a man to succeed, another condition of society enables another kind of man to succeed. And so on all along the long line of different conditions.
The great mistake made by many so-called scientific purifiers of the human race, is in not being able to separate man with reason from animals or beasts without reasoning powers. There is such a thing as intellectual progress and the betterment of the reasoning faculties, but so long as we limit survivorship to the physical and not to the mental powers, we are betraying man into degeneracy instead of helping him out of it.
There is one great teacher whose lessons are to be learned and deeply pondered. They lead to an uplift that no money, and no medical examination, or selection, can possibly attain. He was poor and forsaken; rejected by his own, but he was and is the type to be attained. In establishing the highest type possible to man with reasoning powers, he ran counter to the doctrine of the survival of the fittest as men saw it in his day, so they crucified Him but too late to efface the type which we must follow or fall into degeneracy.