And these, a few pages earlier in the same poem:—

Nations, races, civilisations rise, we shall all agree, because to inherent virtue of breed they add sound customs and laws, acquirements of discipline and knowledge. But, these acquirements made, power established, and crescent from year to year—why do they then fall? If they can make a place for themselves, how much easier should it not be to maintain it?

Two explanations, each falsely asserting itself to be rooted in biological fact, have long been cited and are still cited in order to account for these supreme tragedies of history.

The fallacy of racial senility.—The first may claim Plato and Aristotle as its founders, and consists of an argument from analogy. Races may be conceived in similar terms to individuals. There are many resemblances between a society—a “social organism,” to use Herbert Spencer's phrase—and an individual organism. Just, then, as the individual is mortal, so is the race. Each has its birth, its period of youth and growth, its maturity, and, finally, its decadence, senility and death. So runs the common argument.

We must reply, however, that biology, so far from confirming it, declares as the capital fact which contrasts the individual and the race that, whilst the individual is doomed to die from inherent causes, the race is naturally immortal. The tendency of life is not to die but to live. If individuals die, that is doubtless because, as I believe, more life and fuller is thus attained than if life bodied itself in immortal forms: but the germ-plasm is immortal; it has no inherent tendency either to degenerate or to die. Species exist and flourish now which are millions of years older than mankind. “The individual withers, the race is more and more.”

It may be added that, in historical instances, civilisations have, on the one hand, persisted, and, on the other, fallen, despite change, and even substitution, in the races which created them: and, on the other hand, the most conspicuously persistent of all races in the historic epoch, the Jews, have survived one Empire after another of their oppressors, but have never had an Empire of their own. Thus, so far as the historian is concerned, it is not races at all that die, but civilisations and Empires. Plato's argument from the individual to the race is therefore irrelevant, as well as untrue. The fatalistic conception to which it tempts us, saying that races must die, just as individuals must, and that therefore it is idle to repine or oppose, is utterly unwarrantable and extremely unhealthy. To take our own case, despite the talk about our own racial decadence, nearly all our babies still come into the world fit and strong and healthy—the racial poisons apart. We kill them in scores of thousands every year, but this infant mortality is not a sign that the race is dying, but a sign that even the most splendid living material can be killed or damaged if you try hard enough. The babies do not die because races are mortal, but because individuals are and we kill them. The babies drink poison, eat poison, and breathe poison, and in due course die. The theory of racial senility, inapplicable everywhere because untrue, is most of all inapplicable here. If a race became sterile, Plato and Aristotle would be right. There is no such instance in history, apart from well-defined external, not inherent, causes, as in the case of the Tasmanians. Dismissing this analogy, we may also dismiss, as based upon nothing better, the idea that the great tragedies of history were necessary events at all. We must look elsewhere than amongst the inherent and necessary factors of racial life for the causes which determine these tragedies; and we shall be entitled to assume as conceivable the proposition that, notwithstanding the consistent fall of all our predecessors, the causes are not inevitable, but, being external and environmental, may possibly be controlled: man being not only creature but creator also.

The Lamarckian explanation of decadence.—The second of the two false interpretations of history in terms of biology is still, and always has been, widely credited. When historians have paid any attention to the breed of a people as determining its destiny, they have invariably added to the fallacy of racial senility this no less fecund error. It is that, in consequence of success, a people become idle, thoughtless, unenterprising, luxurious, and that these acquired characters are transmitted to succeeding generations so that, finally, there is produced a degenerate people unable to bear the burden of Empire—and then the crash comes. The historian usually introduces the idea already dismissed by saying that a “young and vigorous race” invaded the Imperial territories—and so forth. The terms “young” and “old,” applied to human races, usually mean nothing at all.

The reader will recognise, of course, in this doctrine of the transmission to children of characters acquired by their parents, the explanation of organic evolution advanced by Lamarck rather more than a century ago. It is employed by historians for the explanation of both the processes they record, progress and retrogression. Thus they suppose that for many generations a race is disciplined, and so at last there is produced a race with discipline in its very bone; or for many generations a nation finds it necessary to make adventure upon the sea, and so at last there is produced a generation of predestined sailors with blue water in its blood. And in similar terms moral and physical retrogression or degeneration are explained.

Let us consider the contrast between the interpretation which accepts the Lamarckian theory of the transmission of acquired characters and that which does not. Consider the babies of a new generation. According to Lamarck, these have in their blood and brain the consequences of the habits of their ancestors. If these have been idle and luxurious, the new babies are predestined to be idle and luxurious too. This, in short, is a “dying nation.” But, if acquired characters are not transmitted, the new generation is, on the whole, not much better, not much worse, than its predecessors—so far as this supposed factor of change is concerned. Each generation makes a fresh start, as we see in the babies of our slums to-day. It does not begin where the last left off—whether that means beginning at a higher or at a lower level than that at which the last started: but it makes a fresh start where the last did.

Now, in general, we have seen that Lamarck's theory is discredited. The view of Mr. Galton is accepted, that acquired characters are not transmitted, either for good or for evil. If there are no other factors of racial degeneration or racial advance, then races do not degenerate or advance, but make a fresh start every generation: and Empires rise and fall without any relation to the breed of the Imperial people—an incredible proposition.

The racial poisons and decadence.—Certain apparent, though not real, exceptions exist to the denial of the Lamarckian theory of the transmission of acquired characters. These exceptions are furnished by what I have called the racial poisons. Alcohol, for instance, is a substance, certainly poisonous in all but very small doses, if not in them, which is carried by the blood to every part of the body and may and does injure its racial elements. Thus a true racial degeneration may be caused by its means: and the possibility of this is not to be ignored. Other poisons, such as those of certain diseases, act similarly.

We must therefore note in passing a biological factor of historical importance, though hitherto entirely unrecognised by historians, and that is disease. Certain of our diseases, and especially consumption or tuberculosis, are at present making history by their extermination of aboriginal races. Minute living creatures, which we call microbes, are introduced into the new and favourable environment constituted by the blood and tissues of human races hitherto unacquainted with them: and the consequences are known to all. But further, it has lately been suggested as highly probable, by Professor Ross and others, that the fall of Greece, that incalculable disaster for mankind, was due to the invasion not of human foes but of the humble living species which are responsible for the disease miscalled malaria. The evidence for this view is by no means slight, and the most recent explanation of an event so abrupt and so disastrous is in all likelihood the correct one. Malaria, like alcohol, produces true racial degeneration, its poisons affecting those racial elements of which the individual body, biologically conceived, is merely the ephemeral host: recalling the great line of Lucretius, “et quasi cursores, vitaï lampada tradunt.” To lame the runner is not to injure the torch he bears—acquired characters are not transmitted; but the racial poison makes dim the lamp ere the runner passes it on.

Selection and racial change.—But, leaving poisons out of the question, races of men and animals do undergo change, progressive and retrogressive, in consequence of the action of another factor than that advanced by Lamarck: and this is the factor of “natural selection” or “survival of the fittest.” If, of any generation, individuals of a certain kind are chosen by the environment for survival and parenthood, the character of the species will change accordingly. If what we call the best are chosen, their goodness will be transmitted in some degree, and the race will advance: if what we call the worst are chosen, their badness will be transmitted in some degree, and the race will degenerate.

The two kinds of progress.—Now in the case of all species other than man, the only possible progress is this racial or inherent progress, dependent upon a choice or selection of parents, and comparable in some measure, as Darwin showed, with the change similarly produced in the selective breeding or “artificial selection” of the lower animals by man. But in the case of man himself, there is a wholly different kind of progress also attainable, which is not inherent or racial progress at all, but yet is real progress: and which has the most important relations to the inherent or racial progress that might be achieved by the process of natural selection, or the choice of parents.

It has been laid down that acquired characters are not transmissible by heredity: but man has learnt—and it is well for him—to circumvent the laws of heredity by transmitting his spiritual acquirements through language and art. Even before writing there was tradition, passed on from mouth to mouth. As long as man was without writing he advanced little faster than other creatures, we may surmise: we know that he has an undistinguished past of probably at least six million years: but with speech and writing came the transmission of acquirements in this special sense; not that the past education of a mother will enlarge her baby's brain, but that she can teach her daughter what she has learnt, and so the child can begin where the parent left off, just as Lamarck wrongly imagined to be the case with the young giraffe, that he supposed to profit by the stretching of the parental necks. It is this transmission of spiritual acquirements—outside the germ-plasm and in defiance of its laws—that explains the amazing advance of man in the last ten or twenty thousand years as compared with the almost speechless ages before them.

This kind of progress is peculiar to man,[78] it is the gift of intelligence, and we may call it traditional or acquired progress. It is an utterly different thing from inherent or racial progress, an improvement in the breed dependent upon the happy choice of parents. And it is surely evident, on a moment's consideration, that acquired progress is compatible with inherent decadence. To use Coleridge's image, a dwarf may see further than a giant if he sits on the giant's shoulders: yet he is a dwarf and the other a giant. Any schoolboy now knows more than Aristotle, and that is true progress of a kind, but the schoolboy may well be a dwarf compared with Aristotle, and may belong to a race degenerate when compared with his; and that is inherent or racial decadence subsisting with acquired or traditional progress.

Now whilst the accumulation of knowledge and art and power from age to age is real progress, it evidently depends for its stability and persistence upon the quality of the race.[79] If the race degenerates—through, say, the selection of the worst for parenthood—the time will come when its heritage is too much for it. The pearls of the ancestral art are now cast before swine, and are trampled on: statues, temples, books are destroyed or burnt or lost. If an Empire has been built, the degenerate race cannot sustain it. There is no wealth but life: and if the quality of the life fails, neither battleships nor libraries nor symphonies nor anything else will save a nation. This we all know, though no one who observed our legislation or read our Parliamentary debates would suspect that it had ever entered into our minds. Empires and civilisations, then, have fallen, despite the strength and magnitude of the superstructure, because the foundations decayed: and the bigger and heavier the superstructure the less could it survive their failure. If the Fiji islanders degenerate, there is little consequence: if the breed of Romans degenerate, all their vast mass of acquired progress and power crushes them into dramatic ruin. This image, I believe, truly expresses the relation between the two wholly distinct kinds of progress, which we have yet to learn to distinguish. Acquired progress will not compensate for racial or inherent decadence. If the race is going down, it will not compensate to add another colony to your Empire: on the contrary, the bigger the Empire the stronger must be the race: the bigger the superstructure the stronger the foundations. Acquired progress is real progress, but it is always dependent for its maintenance upon racial or inherent progress—or, at least, upon racial maintenance.

Nothing fails like success.—I believe, then, that civilisations and Empires have succumbed because they represented only acquired or traditional or educational progress and this availed not at all when the races that built them up began to degenerate. Now the only explanation of racial degeneration yet offered by the historians—apart from the foolish one of racial senility—is the Lamarckian one of the transmission of habits of luxury and idleness from parent to child: an explanation which the modern study of heredity empowers us to repudiate. What theory of this alleged degeneration is there to offer in its place: and especially what theory which explains racial degeneration amongst not the conquered but the conquerors: amongst the successful, the Imperial, the cultured, the leisured, the well-catered for in all respects, bodily and mental? Why is it that not enslaved but Imperial peoples degenerate? Why is it that nothing fails like success?

What I believe to be the true and sufficient answer has been given by no historian: but the key to it is only fifty years old. The reason is that no race or species, vegetable or animal or human, can maintain—much less raise—its organic level unless its best be selected for parenthood. It is true of a race as of an individual that it must work for its living—so to speak—if it is not to degenerate. When the terms are too easy, down you go. The tape-worm has given up even digesting for its living, and we know its degeneracy—all hooks and mouth. Society works and hands over its predigested food to such social parasites amongst ourselves. You must struggle or you will degenerate—even if only with rhyme or counterpoint, not necessarily for bread. “Effort is the law,” as Ruskin said: whether for a livelihood or for enjoyment. Living things are the product of the struggle for existence: we are thus evolved strugglers by constitution: and directly we cease to struggle we forfeit the possibilities of our birthright. “Thou, O God,” said Leonardo, “hast given all good things to man at the price of labour.”

The case is the same with races. Directly the conditions become too easy, selection ceases, and it is as successful to be incompetent or lazy or vicious as to be worthy. The hard conditions that kept weeding out the unworthy are now relaxed and the fine race they made goes back again. Finally there occurs the phenomenon of reversed selection, when it is fitter to be bad than good, cowardly than brave—as when religious persecution murders all who are true to themselves and spares hypocrites and apostates: or when healthy children are killed in factories whilst feeble-minded children or deaf-mutes are carefully tended until maturity and then sent into the world to reproduce their maladies. Under reversed selection such results are obtained as a breeder of race-horses or plants would obtain if he went to work on similar lines: the race degenerates rapidly: and if it be an Imperial race its Empire comes crashing down about its ears. All Empires and civilisations hitherto have involved the partial or complete arrest or reversal of the process of natural selection: and the racial degeneration which necessarily ensued has been the cause of their invariable doom.

When a primitive race is making its way by force, selection is stringent. The weak, cowardly, diseased, stupid are expunged from generation to generation. As civilisation advances, a higher ethical level is reached: all true civilisation tending to abrogate and ameliorate the struggle for existence. The diseased and weakly and feeble-minded are no longer left to pay the penalty sternly exacted by Nature for unfitness: they are allowed to survive and multiply. A successful race can apparently afford to permit this, as a race that is fighting for its existence cannot. But in reality no race can afford this absolutely fatal process.

There is thus a real risk involved in the accumulation of acquired, traditional or educational progress. Not only does it tend to abrogate or even to reverse selection, but it serves to disguise the consequences of this abrogation. If a subhuman race degenerates the fact is evident: but such a nation as our own may quite well degenerate whilst the accumulation of acquired progress, transmitted by education, almost completely cloaks the fact for a time. We may be congratulating ourselves upon our progress, upon our knowledge, our science and art, our institutions, legal and charitable, whilst all the time the breed is undergoing retrogression.

We see now, I think, the explanation of the truth expressed by Gibbon,—“all that is human must retrograde if it do not advance.” Why should this be so? Why should it not be possible merely to maintain a position gained? The answer is that the civilisation which merely maintains its position is one in which selection has ceased: if selection had not ceased, the position would be more than maintained, there would be advance. But without selection the breed will certainly degenerate, the lower individuals multiplying more rapidly than higher ones, in accordance with Spencer's law that the higher the type of the individual the less rapidly does he multiply; and thus the race which is not advancing is retrograding, as Gibbon declared.

Natural selection is the sole factor of efficient and permanent progress, but the traditional or acquired progress which we call civilisation tends to thwart or abrogate or even invert this process. I thus believe that the conditions necessary for the secure ascent of any race, an ascent secured in its very blood, made stable in its very bone, have not yet been achieved in history: and I advance this as the reason why history records no enduring Empire.

Some historical instances.—In the face of certain facts of contemporary history I do not for a moment assert that there are no other causes of Imperial failure than the arrest or reversal of selection. But I do assert that if this is not the cause, then, in the absence of the transmission of acquired characters, the race has not degenerated, and is capable of reasserting itself. Only by the arrest or reversal of selection can a race degenerate—apart from the racial poisons. If, then, a civilisation or Empire has fallen through causes altogether non-biological—through carelessness, or neglect of motherhood or alteration of ideals—the changes in character so produced are not transmitted to the children, and the race is not degenerate but merely deteriorated in each generation.

For instance, we have been brought up to believe that there is no possible future for Spain; it is a dying nation, a senile individual, a people of degenerates; it has had its day, which can never return. The historian explains this by the false analogy between a race and an individual, and by the false Lamarckian theory of heredity. To these the biologist retorts with comments upon their falsity, and with the conviction that since Spain, even allowing for the anti-eugenic labours of the Inquisition, has not been subjected to the only process which can ensure real degeneration—viz., the consistent and stringent selection of the worst—she is yet capable of regeneration. Regeneration is not really the word, because there has been little real degeneration, but only the successive deterioration of successive and undegenerate generations.

If we took an animal species that has degenerated, such as the intestinal parasites, and endeavoured to regenerate them, we should begin to realise the magnitude of our task. That is not the task for Spain, the biologist asserts. Merely the environment must be altered,—not the mountain ranges and the rivers, Buckle notwithstanding, but the really potent factors in the environment, the spiritual and psychical and social factors—and the deterioration of each new generation, inherently undegenerate, will cease. I am using these opposed terms with great care and of set purpose.

And the biologist is right. The facts concerning which so many historians have shaken their heads, and upon which they have based so many moralisings and theories of history, the facts which they have cited in support of their false analogies and misconceptions of heredity—due, of course, to the errors of former biology—turn out to be not facts at all, or, at any rate, only facts of the moment. The “dying nation,” as Lord Salisbury called it, has occasion to alter its psychical environment. It introduces the practice of education; it begins to shake off the yoke of ecclesiasticism; and what are the consequences?

The new generation is found to be potentially little worse and little better than its predecessors of the sixteenth century. There has been no national or racial degeneration. The environment is modified for the better, i.e., so as to choose the better, and Spain, as they say in misleading phrase, “takes on a new lease of life.” The historian of the present day, knowing as a historian what qualities of blood have been in the Spanish people, and basing his theories upon sound biology, must confidently assert that that blood, incapable, as he knows, of degeneration by any Lamarckian process, may still retain its ancient quality and will yet make history.

But the historian might well write a volume upon the same thesis as applied to China and Japan. We know historically what were the immediate effects in one generation of a total change of environment in Japan. That change has not yet occurred in China, but must inevitably occur. Consider for a moment how the historian, made far-sighted and clear-sighted by biology, must contemplate the history of this astounding people. The popular belief used to be that China illustrated the so-called law of nations. It was the decadent, though monstrous, relic of an ancient civilisation; it had had its day. Inevitable degeneration, which must befall all peoples, had come upon it. Behold it in the paralysis which precedes death!

But in the light of the facts of Japan, the man in the street and the historian alike have in this case found modern biology superfluous in enabling them to arrive at sound conclusions. They now believe what the Darwinian has been compelled to believe for half a century, and more strongly than ever during the latter part of that period, when the doctrine of the transmission of modifications was finally discredited. A clever writer invents the phrase “the yellow peril,” and people discard their old theories. The metaphor must be changed. This is not paralysis, but merely slumber. Doubtless, it is an unnatural slumber; doubtless, it is not the slumber which brings renewed strength. It is suspense or stupor, not recuperation; but assuredly it is not paralysis. Who now would dare to say that China has had its day, even if he still clings to the old fictions about Spain?

Motherhood and history.—Here, also, reference must again be made to another factor of history to which, as I think, the biologist must attach enormous importance, but which no historian yet has adequately reckoned with. Our prime assumption from beginning to end is that “there is no wealth but life,” or, if one may venture to improve upon Ruskin, there is no wealth but mind; and in the attempt to suggest interpretations of history based upon this truth, so little recked of by the historian, we have considered the life in question from the point of view of its determination by heredity, and its varying value according to the inherent and transmissible characters selected in each generation. But a word must be said as to the other factor which, with heredity, determines the character of the individual—and that factor is the environment. I wish merely to note the most important aspect of the environment of human beings, and to observe that historians hitherto have wholly ignored it; yet its influence is incalculable. I refer to motherhood.

One might have the most perfect system of selection of the finest and highest individuals for parenthood; but the babies whose potentialities—heredity gives no more—are so splendid, are always, will be always, dependent upon motherhood. What was the state of motherhood during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? This factor counts in history; and always will count so long as, three times in every century, the only wealth of nations is reduced to dust, and is raised again from helpless infancy. As to Rome we know little, whatever may be suspected: but we know that here in the heart of the greatest Empire in history—and it is at the heart that Empires rot—thousands of mothers go out every day to tend dead machines, whilst their own flesh and blood, with whom lies the Imperial destiny, are tended anyhow or not at all. It may yet be said by some enlightened historian of the future that the living wealth of this people, in the twentieth century, began to be eaten away by the cancer which we call “married women's labour,” and that, as will be evident to that historian's readers, its damnation was sure. To-day our historians and politicians think in terms of regiments and tariffs and “Dreadnoughts”: the time will come when they must think in terms of babies and motherhood. We must think in such terms too if we wish Great Britain to be much longer great. Meanwhile some of us see the perennial slaughter of babies in this land, and the deterioration of many for every one killed outright, the waste of mothers' travail and tears: and we recall Ruskin's words:—

Had all Roman mothers been Cornelias, would Rome have fallen?[80] Consider the imitation mothers—no longer mammalia—to be found in certain classes to-day—mothers who should be ashamed to look any tabby-cat in the face; consider the ignorant and downtrodden mothers amongst our lower classes; and ask whether these things are not making history.

The survival of the Jews.—The principles the discussion of which has here been attempted had all been set down before it suddenly seemed clear that they found their warrant and application in the unexampled riddle of the persistence and success, throughout more than two thousand years and a thousand vicissitudes, of the Jewish people. It is true that we have here no exception to the apparent law that Empires are mortal, for within this period there never was a Jewish Empire: the Jews were never subject to the risk involved for racial or inherent progress by the possession of great acquired powers. But just as the fall of Empires has often not been the fall of races—various races having at various times carried on the same Imperial tradition—so the persistence of the Jews, as contrasted with the impermanence of Empires, has been the persistence of a race. I believe that the principles already laid down offer us an adequate explanation of this unique case: and further, that if we had begun with the case of the Jews, endeavouring, by the investigation of their case, to explain the contrasted case of other races and of all Empires hitherto, we should have arrived at the same principles.

It has been asserted that that race or people decays in which selection ceases or is reversed; that in the absence of selection of the worthy for parenthood, no species, vegetable, animal or human, can prosper—much less progress. Now the Jews, the one human race of which we know assuredly that it has persisted unimpaired, have been the most continuously and stringently selected of any race, I suppose, that can be named. Every measure of persecution and repression practised against them by the people amongst whom they have lived, has directly tended towards the very end which those people least desired to compass. Other peoples found themselves prosperous through the efforts of their fathers; the struggle for existence abated; it was, so to say, as fit to be unfit as to be fit—with the inevitable result. But this has never been the case of the Jews. They have always had to struggle for life intensely: and their unexampled struggle has been a great source of their unexampled strength. The Jew who was a weakling or a fool had no chance at all; the weaklings and the fools being weeded out, intensity and strength of mind became the common heritage of this amazing people.

Secondly, there was everything to favour motherhood. Here religious precept and ethical tradition joined with stem necessity to the same end—the end which always meant a new and strong beginning for the next generation. Even to-day all observers are agreed that infant mortality is at a minimum amongst the Jews; their children are superior in height and weight and chest measurement to Gentile children brought up amidst poverty far less intense in our own great cities; in a better material environment, but a far inferior maternal environment. The Jewish mother is the mother of children innately superior, on the average, since they are the fruit of such long ages of stringent parental selection, and she makes more of them because she fails to nurse them only in the rarest cases, when she has no choice, and because in every detail her maternal care is incomparably superior to that of her Gentile sister. Given a high standard of motherhood in a highly selected race, what other result than that we daily witness and envy can we expect?

Thirdly, the Jews do not abuse alcohol, and thus avoid one of the few causes of true racial degeneration apart from selection of the worst for parenthood.

If these principles are valid, it is evident that our redemption from the fate of all our predecessors is to be found only in Eugenics—the selection of the best for parenthood. In his address to the Sociological Society in 1904, in which he defined this term, Mr. Galton named as one of the duties before the Society, “historical enquiry into the rates with which the various classes of society (classified according to civic usefulness) have contributed to the population at various times, in ancient and modern nations.” “There is strong reason for believing,” he continued, “that national rise and decline is closely connected with this influence.”[81]

What is a good environment?—Using the word environment in its widest sense, including, for instance, public opinion—and its use in any sense less wide is always erroneous and misleading—we may say that it is our business to provide the environment which selects the best for parenthood and discourages the parenthood of the worst—say the deaf and dumb, the feeble-minded, the insane, the epileptic, the inebriate, those afflicted with hereditary disease of other kinds, and so forth. Our principles should enable us, also, I think, to define what we mean by a good environment. Comprehensive and indiscriminate charity means a good environment for many in a sense, but it may also mean the selection of the worst for parenthood—e.g., the feeble-minded. This “good” environment then means the degeneration of the race. We must therefore appraise environment in terms of its selective action. A good environment is that which selects the good, and the best environment is that which selects the best; discovers them, makes the utmost of them, and confers upon them the supreme privilege and duty of parenthood. That and that alone is the best environment, and all other moral judgments upon environment are fallacious and will be disastrous.

The necessary conclusion.—National Eugenics teaches that the first duty of all governments and patriots and good citizens is, to quote Ruskin again, “the production and recognition of human worth, the detection and extinction of human unworthiness.” The idea is not new-fangled, but was clearly laid down by Plato, and by Theognis two centuries before him.

Eugenics is a project of the most elevated and provident morality, aiming at no object less sublime than the ennoblement of mankind; and if one may suggest its motto it would be, The products of progress are not mechanisms but men. It is based upon the principle of the selection or choice of the superior for parenthood, which has been the essential factor of all progress in the world of life, but which all civilisations have tended in some degree to abrogate—or even to reverse, as when the feeble-minded child is cared for till maturity and sent out into the world to produce its like, whilst healthy children are daily destroyed by ignorance and neglect.

“Through Nature only can we ascend”—and the merit of the eugenic proposal is that it is built upon “the solid ground of nature.”

To the economist, it declares that the culture of the racial life is the vital industry of any people.

It is to work through marriage, an institution more ancient than mankind, and supremely valuable in its services to childhood—with which lies all human destiny.

Eugenics appeals to the individual, asking for a little imagination, which will make us realise that the future will one day be the present and that to serve it is to serve no fiction or phantom, but a reality as real as the present generation.

It teaches the responsibility of the noblest and most sacred of all professions, which is parenthood, and it makes a sober and dignified claim to be regarded as a constituent of the religion of the future.

It goes to the root of the matter; where the well-meaning, but short-sighted, pin their faith on the hospitals, the eugenist seeks to brand the transmission of hereditary disease as a crime, and thus literally to extirpate it altogether.

That its methods are practicable is proved by the fact that it is practised—as by the northern society for the “permanent care of the feeble-minded,” which serves the present and the future simultaneously and reconciles the law of love with the earlier law of nature—which asserts that parenthood must be denied to the unworthy—without blame or malice, but without exception. It suggests the principles of a New Imperialism, and offers, I submit, our sole chance of escape from the fate which has overtaken all previous civilisations. It honours men and women by declaring that human parenthood is crowned with responsibility to the unborn, and to all time coming, and that man, the animal in body, is also a self-conscious being, “looking before and after,” who is human because he is responsible, and to whom the laws of nature have been revealed, not to satisfy an intellectual curiosity, but for the highest end conceivable—the elevation of his race.

Let me quote a fine passage from Wordsworth's “Prelude”:—

Consider how far we have come, the base degrees by which we did ascend, and answer with Shakespeare, “There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.”

CHAPTER XVI
NATIONAL EUGENICS: MR. BALFOUR ON DECADENCE

The lecture of which the previous chapter is the written form was prepared and delivered before I had an opportunity of seeing Mr. A. J. Balfour's lecture on “Decadence” delivered a few days before. That has since been printed, and is well worthy of our attention. In Mr. Balfour we have a representative political thinker, an experimental statesman and, furthermore, a former President of the British Association, deeply interested in, and favourably disposed towards, scientific enquiry and the scientific method. Further, this lecture has been widely noticed, though all the criticisms I have seen seem to me to miss the point. No apology, then, is necessary for a special discussion of this most suggestive lecture in direct relation with the foregoing theory of its subject.

Political and national decadence is Mr. Balfour's theme, and we note first that here is a contemporary thinker, not unread in recent biology, including the work of Weismann, who is prepared to make use of the idea that societies are inherently mortal, as individuals are. One wonders when we shall be rid of this pernicious instance of the argument from analogy, which is already much more than two thousand years old.

Next it may be noticed that, though Mr. Balfour has deliberately discussed the idea of natural selection, he has been led wholly astray from its true relation to the question under discussion by reason of falling into the common error which Sir E. Ray Lankester has recently exposed, as Huxley did several decades ago. Mr. Balfour conceives natural selection to issue from the struggle for existence between species or societies. It has already been pointed out that the all-important natural selection is not between species or societies but within them. The struggle for existence is fought out mainly between the immature individuals of any species or society. Its issue determines the survivors for parenthood and the future. Mr. Balfour must have read Professor Ray Lankester's recent Romanes Lecture in which all this is so clearly shown, but he has unfortunately retained the popular conception of natural selection as acting between species or societies, and has in consequence failed, I will not say to find, but even to discuss in any adequate measure, the theory of racial and national decadence, defined in the preceding chapter. He merely discusses “competition between groups of communities,” and rightly finds it inadequate to account for the great tragedies of history.

There follows a passage which may be heartily assented to, on the very grounds on which the entire lecture may be welcomed, namely, that it suggests the inadequacy of the common explanations of national decadence advanced by historians. Says Mr. Balfour:—