FROM The Descent of Man BY Charles Darwin

THE SLIGHT CORPOREAL STRENGTH OF MAN, his little speed, his want of natural weapons, &c., are more than counterbalanced, firstly by his intellectual powers, through which he has, whilst still remaining in a barbarous state, formed for himself weapons, tools, &c., and secondly by his social qualities which lead him to give aid to his fellow-men and to receive it in return. No country in the world abounds in a greater degree with dangerous beasts than Southern Africa; no country presents more fearful physical hardships than the Arctic regions; yet one of the puniest races, namely, the Bushmen, maintain themselves in Southern Africa, as do the dwarfed Esquimaux in the Arctic regions. The early progenitors of man were, no doubt, inferior in intellect, and probably in social disposition, to the lowest existing savages; but it is quite conceivable that they might have existed, or even flourished, if, whilst they gradually lost their brutelike powers, such as climbing trees, &c., they at the same time advanced in intellect. But granting that the progenitors of man were far more helpless and defenceless than any existing savages, if they had inhabited some warm continent or large island, such as Australia or New Guinea, or Borneo (the latter island being now tenanted by the orang), they would not have been exposed to any special danger. In an area as large as one of these islands, the competition between tribe and tribe would have been sufficient, under favourable conditions, to have raised man, through the survival of the fittest, combined with the inherited effects of habit, lo his present high position in the organic scale.

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Turning now to the social and moral faculties. In order that primeval men, or the ape-like progenitors of man, should have become social, they must have acquired the same instinctive feelings which impel other animals to live in a body; and they no doubt exhibited the same general disposition. They would have felt uneasy when separated from their comrades, for whom they would have felt some degree of love; they would have warned each other of danger, and have given mutual aid in attack or defence. All this implies some degree of sympathy, fidelity, and courage. Such social qualities, the paramount importance of which to the lower animals is disputed by no one, were no doubt acquired by the progenitors of man in a similar manner, namely, through natural selection, aided by inherited habit. When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if the one tribe included (other circumstances being equal) a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this trihe would without doubt succeed best and conquer the other. Let it be borne in mind how all-important, in the never-ceasing wars of savages, fidelity and courage must be. The advantage which disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined hordes follows chiefly from the confidence which each man feels in his comrades. Obedience, as Mr. Bagehot has well shewn, is of the highest value, for any form of government is better than none. Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe possessing the above qualities in a high degree would spread and be victorious over other tribes; but in the course of time it would, judging from all past history, be in its turn overcome by some other and still more highly endowed tribe. Thus the social and moral qualities would tend slowly to advance and be diffused throughout the world.

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NATURAL SELECTION AS AFFECTING CIVILISED NATIONS

In the last and present chapters I have considered the advancement of man from a former semi-human condition to his present state as a barbarian. But some remarks on the agency of natural selection on civilised nations may be here worth adding. This subject has been ably discussed by Mr. W. R. Greg, and previously by Mr. Wallace and Mr. Galton. Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors. With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.

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With civilised nations, as far as an advanced standard of morality, and an increased number of fairly well-endowed men are concerned, natural selection apparently effects but little; though the fundamental social instincts were originally thus gained. But I have already said enough, whilst treating of the lower races, on the causes which lead to the advance of morality, namely, the approbation of our fellow-men—the strengthening of our sympathies by habit— example and imitation—reason experience and even self-interest—instruction during youth, and religious feelings.

A most important obstacle in civilised countries to an increase in the number of men of a superior class has been strongly urged by Mr. Greg and Mr. Galton, namely, the fact that the very poor and reckless, who are often degraded by vice, almost invariably marry early, whilst the careful and frugal, who are generally otherwise virtuous, marry late in life, so that they may be able to support themselves and their children in comfort. Those who marry early produce within a given period not only a greater number of generations, but, as shown by Dr. Duncan, they produce many more children. The children, moreover, that are born by mothers during the prime of life are heavier and larger, and therefore probably more vigorous, than those born at other periods. Thus the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: "The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts— and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal 'struggle for existence,' it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults."

There are, however, some checks to this downward tendency. We have seen that the intemperate suffer from a high rate of mortality, and the extremely profligate leave few offspring. The poorest classes crowd into towns, and it has been proved by Dr. Stark from the statistics of ten years in Scotland, that at all ages the death-rate is higher in towns than in rural districts, "and during the first five years of life the town death-rate is almost exactly double that of the rural districts." As these returns include both the rich and the poor, no doubt more than double the number of births would be requisite to keep up the number of the very poor inhabitants in the towns, relatively to those in the country. With women, marriage at too early an age is highly injurious; for it has been found in France that, "twice as many wives under twenty die in the year, as died out of the same number of the unmarried." The mortality, also, of husbands under twenty is "excessively high," but what the cause of this may be seems doubtful. Lastly, if the men who prudently delay marrying until they can bring up their families in comfort, were to select, as they often do, women in the prime of life, the rate of increase in the better class would be only slightly lessened.

Natural selection follows from the struggle for existence; and this from a rapid rate of increase. It is impossible not bitterly to regret, but whether wisely is another question, the rate at which man tends to increase; for this leads in barbarous tribes to infanticide and many other evils, and in civilised nations to abject poverty, celibacy, and to the late marriages of the prudent. But as man suffers from the same physical evils with the lower animals, he has no right to expect an immunity from the evils consequent on the struggle for existence. Had he not been subjected to natural selection, assuredly he would never have attained to the rank of manhood. When we see in many parts of the world enormous areas of the most fertile land peopled by a few wandering savages, but which are capable of supporting numerous happy homes, it might be argued that the struggle for existence had not been sufficiently severe to force man upwards to his highest standard. Judging from all that we know of man and the lower animals, there has always been sufficient variability in the intellectual and moral faculties, for their steady advancement through natural selection. No doubt such advancement demands many favourable concurrent circumstances; but it may well be doubted whether the most favourable would have sufficed, had not the rate of increase been rapid, and the consequent struggle for existence severe to an extreme degree.

FROM Social Darwinism: A Definition BY R J. Halliday

WHAT IS IT, if anything, that the term Social Darwinism defines or describes?

One might, of course, be literal-minded. Social Darwinism is that enterprise or ideology, founded in the nineteenth century, which holds social evolution to depend upon the operation of the law of natural selection of favourable heritable variants. A definition of this kind, if indeed it can be counted a definition, has several virtues—the virtue of obvious simplicity as well as that of suggesting, however crudely, a general logical type with a minimum necessary content.

The biology of natural selection was undoubtedly a model evolutionary science for many thinkers in the century. But there was more than one account or explanation of natural selection, as well as a mass of conflicting evidence about the ways in which the variations necessary to continued biological evolution arose and how, if at all, such variations were transmitted to offspring. A commitment to the biology of natural selection entailed nothing uniform either for sociological method or for political doctrine.

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Some of the weaknesses of the literal definition might be repaired by attending to the conventional usage of the term established by scholars and critics of Social Darwinism. Stated briefly, without regard to particular nuances, the convention is to present Social Darwinism as an ideology defending free-market economics and opposing the interventionist state. On this definition, Social Darwinism is a synonym for laissez-faire and an antonym of state-socialism or collectivism. Conventionally defined, the term is reserved for that peculiar variety of individualism which was concerned less to assert the dependence of social evolution upon the operation of natural selection, than to claim the cessation or virtual cessation of natural selection due to the growth of party and government bureaucracies committed to the introduction and administration of welfare services. Hence a practitioner is defined as one opposed to state-socialism or collectivism and in favour of unregulated competition between individuals, groups, nations, or races. A practitioner might justify Imperialism as an indispensable aid to the selection of races. He might justify a compulsory reduction in the birth rate of particular social groups on the grounds of biological unfitness. In both cases the final point is to resist social reform by means of public agency, either by offering Imperialism as an alternative to domestic reforms, or by offering birth control as an alternative to increased spending on welfare and medical services.

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As we have seen, the convention is to present Social Darwinism as a synonym for laissez-faire and antonym of state-socialism or collectivism. Yet, understood as a philosophical idiom, this labelling is inappropriate in at least one important sense. For the Social Darwinist, the rational faculty of each individual was insignificant compared with his inheritance, while the rationality of the process or events which made each individual the product of an inheritance was never in question. If man's history was irreversible, so was the past course of human evolution. The individual might, of course, either grumble or lament. But the laws of selection and adaptation were natural laws; laws which were necessary rather than contingent, and absolute rather than conditional. Either way, their operation was not affected by the carping of individuals. On this view, the reason of the individual agent was dispensable, but the rationality of the laws of society was incontrovertible. Despite occasional appearances to the contrary, that which is conventionally understood as Social Darwinism rested on a belief in the superiority of social to individual reason and on a belief in social evolution as an occurrence independent of individual agency. This helps to explain why thinkers such as Benjamin Kidd in Social Evolution and Henry Drummond in the Ascent of Man were able to argue an evolutionary significance for religious faith. The established Church was in a position to provide a sanction or justification for the conditions of progress which did not depend upon individual reason. The necessity of collective faith was the first teaching of evolutionary science.

Here, perhaps, there is a resemblance to classical economics. If social harmony was the design of no one but simply the consequence of market laws, then social arrangements were self-adjusting, requiring no external political ordering. The specific rationality of the preference could properly give way to the overall rationality of the market mechanism. Given this interpretation, Social Darwinism was no more than a restatement of classical economic theory. Whatever individualist content there was, it presumed at the very least the operations of a free market. This is an attractive picture and one which is fashionable nowadays, but it is at best a part of the truth. While the beneficent operation of natural selection might be reduced to the operation of the free economic market, equally it might be reduced to a programme of eugenics. This point merits detailed consideration since it is crucial to our search for a definition. What is to be gained or lost by making the term Social Darwinism a synonym for eugenics? Would this make possible a closer identification of practitioners?

One of our conditions at least is met by making Social Darwinism and eugenics synonymous. As both doctrine and ideology, eugenics was necessarily and not just contingently dependent upon a particular theory of biology and upon a more or less uniform conception of how natural selection operated. The eugenist programme to breed the "fit" and to sterilize or to limit the breeding of the "unfit" required an explanation of the mechanism of evolution on the basis of a sharp distinction between soma and germ-plasm; between, that is, the living organism and its hereditary constitution. For the eugenist, heredity was that process or event brought about by the transference from one generation to another of a substance with a definitive and unalterable chemical and molecular structure. For them, the permanence of the germ-plasm or hereditary substance was proof that the sole heritable variations were those located within the germplasm. Modifications or adaptations due to the environment were not inherited. In effect, the only important continuity in the evolutionary process was genetic. This being so, Nurture was less significant than Nature and to be effective man's agency had to concentrate on the improvement of the population's genetic endowment. To do this, some and not other bearers of germ-plasm should be selected to reproduce their kind. Without prior decisions about the relative status of heredity and environment and about those individuals or groups "naturally" fitted to reproduce, eugenics was unthinkable. This is to put the matter too bluntly. Even so, the case for eugenics did hold rigorously to the unimportance of environmental factors, to the non-inheritance of acquired characters, and to correlations between undesirable social status and high birth rate. Furthermore, the relationship between these beliefs was not simply one of congruence, but one of intrinsic or essential dependence. This indicates one more justification for making Social Darwinism a synonym for eugenics. We can now be more precise about the antipathy to socialism.

The adherents of eugenics were opposed to socialism on the particular ground of demography, not on general grounds of individuality or individualism. The practice of socialism in providing welfare, medical, and insurance services was thought to upset a population's biological stability by aiding the survival of the unfit. In short, socialism ran counter to natural law by limiting the scope of selection and competition. Those individuals who would previously have been rejected, either by death or by an inability to reproduce their kind, were now both surviving and reproducing. Socialism, then, was equated with the fact of a differential birth rate favouring the survival of the unfit, rather than with collectivism or with an undue and dangerous extension of central government. The two equations could not be kept entirely separate, but the crucial issue was one of birth rate and differential reproductive success. The eugenic answers to the problem were many and varied. All of them, however, turned ultimately upon the existence of an illiterate and intemperate urban proletariat supplemented by the influx of alien immigration. Hence the simple translations of the practitioners. The supposed biological criteria of fit and unfit were translatecl either in terms of social and economic status, or in terms of nationality and geographical race. Pauperism, for instance, whether of the native or alien variety, was the sign for genetic inferiority and unemployment the token of a hereditary incapacity. Socialism as a creed became an ideological symbol for the Jew and the illiterate proletarian. On this view, the alternatives to socialism were obvious enough. The proletariat could, of course, be instructed in the use of contraceptive devices. A system of legal restraint over the reproduction of dysgenic strains might be instituted. Perhaps tax relief would prevent the voluntary abstinence of the fit and encourage eugenically good families to have more babies. The immigration laws and the Aliens Act could always be made more complex and more discriminatory. Whatever the particular remedy, socialism was to be resisted and finally dismantled by means of eugenic population control.

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No matter the biological significance of genetic inheritance, no matter the acute differences between natural and artificial selection, for our practitioners the only empirical characteristics defined by the words "fit" and "unfit" were social and economic characteristics. The practitioners of Social Darwinism believed in a close matching of genetic and social structures. Other things being equal, a relatively deprived economic and social status was an indication of inferior genetic material. In effect, the hierarchical social structure reflected a genetic "great chain of being." At the bottom, an inferior class or classes, constantly reproducing and constantly in receipt of welfare services, transmitting a defective inheritance to its offspring: at the top, social and economic elites, selected by competition but constantly burdened and constantly underbreeding. Though the practitioners of Social Darwinism made many proposals and investigated many problems in a sophisticated and humane way, in the end the science of social evolution amounted to a practice of culling the socially and economically deprived. The only full practical consequence was the reduction or removal of inferior genetic material; the decision about inferiority and superiority being taken either upon the basis of (disputable) scientific "truths," or because of a prejudice against relatively deprived groups. Here, the realities of biological theory slip easily into the realities of political oppression; one needs an effort of will to keep them apart.




FROM The Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics

BY Karl Pearson

THE STRUGGLE OF MAN AGAINST MAN, with its victory to the tougher and more crafty: the struggle of the tribe against tribe, with its defeat for the less socially organized: the contest of nation with nation whether in trade or in war, with the mastery for the foreseeing nation, for the nation with the cleaner bill of health, the more united purpose of its classes, and the sounder intellectual equipment of its units: are not these only phases of the struggle for existence, the factors which have made for human progress, which have developed man from brute into sentient being? We have been told that "the cosmic process is opposed to the ethical"! But from the standpoint of science, is not the ethical the outcome of the cosmic? Are not the physique, the intellectuality, the morality of man, the product of that grim warfare between individual and individual, between society and society, and between humanity and nature, of which we even yet see no end? The ethical as the product of the cosmic process will indeed aid us when we pass outside the field of science. But standing well within the boundaries of that field, are men to cry like little children because the world is not "as it ought to be"?

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As we have found conscientiousness is inherited, so I have little doubt that the criminal tendency descends in stocks. To-day we feed our criminals up, and we feed up the insane, we let both out of the prison or the asylum "reformed" or "cured" as the case may be, only after a few months to return to state-supervision, leaving behind them the germs of a new generation of deteriorants. The average number of crimes due to the convicts in His Majesty's Prisons to-day is ten apiece. We cannot reform the criminal, nor cure the insane from the standpoint of heredity, the taint varies not with their moral or mental conduct. These are products of the somatic cells, the disease lies deeper in their germinal constitution. Education for the criminal, fresh air for the tuberculous, rest and food for the neurotic—these are excellent, they may bring control, sound lungs, and sanity to the individual; but they will not save the offspring from the need of like treatment, nor from the danger of collapse when the time of strain comes. They cannot make a nation sound in mind and body, they merely screen degeneracy behind a throng of arrested degenerates. Our highly developed human sympathy will no longer allow us to watch the state purify itself by aid of crude natural selection. We see pain and suffering only to relieve it, without inquiry as to the moral character of the sufferer or as to his national or racial value. And this is right—no man is responsible for his own being; and nature and nurture, over which he had no control, have made him the being he is, good or evil. But here science steps in, crying, "Let the reprieve be accepted, but next remind the social conscience of its duty to the race. No nation can preserve its efficiency unless dominant fertility be associated with the mentally and physically fitter stocks. The reprieve is granted, but let there be no heritage if you would build up and preserve a virile and efficient people."

Here, I hold, we reach the kernel of the truth which the science of Eugenics has at present revealed. The biological factors are dominant in the evolution of mankind; these, and these alone, can throw light on the rise and fall of nations, on racial progress and national degeneracy. In highly civilized states, the growth of the communal feeling—upon which indeed these states depend for their very existence—has not kept step with our knowledge of the laws which govern race development. Consciously or unconsciously we have suspended the racial purgation maintained in less developed communities by natural selection. We return our criminals after penance, our insane and tuberculous after "recovery," to their old lives; we leave the mentally defective as flotsam on the flood tide of primordial passions. We disregard on every side these two great principles: (a ) the inheritance of variations, and (b) the correlation in heredity of unlike imperfections. The statesman as usual is inert, waiting for the growth of popular opinion. Doctors, we are told, do not believe in heredity. If that be so, they have small idea of the most plentiful harvest yet reaped by modern science. The philanthropist looks to hygiene, to education, to general environment, for the preservation of the race. It is the easy path, but it cannot achieve the desired result. These things are needful tools to the efficient, and passable crutches to the halt; but at least on one point Mendelian and Biometrician are in agreement—there is no hope of racial purification in any environment which does not mean selection of the germ.

If I speak strongly, it is because I feel strongly; and the strength of my feeling does not depend on the few facts I have brought before you to-day. It would be possible to paint a lurid picture—and label it Race-Suicide. That is feasible to any one who has seen, even from afar, the nine circles of that dread region which stretches from slum to reformatory, from casual ward and stew to prison, from hospital and sanatorium to asylum and special school; that infernal lake which sends its unregarded rivulets to befoul more fertile social tracts. But the scope of Eugenics is not to stir the social conscience by an exaggerated picture of racial dangers. Those dangers are not wholly recent, if they are increasing in intensity; they are not peculiar to England, as a brief acquaintance with French and German conditions will suffice to show.


FROM National Life from the Standpoint of Science BY Karl Pearson

FROM THE STANDPOINT OF SCIENCE there are two questions we can, or, rather, we must, ask. First: What, from the scientific standpoint, is the function of a nation? What part from the natural history aspect does the national organization play in the universal struggle for existence? And, secondly, What has science to tell us of the best methods of fitting the nation for its task?

To answer at all effectually the latter question, we must first consider what is the proper answer to he given to the former. I shall therefore endeavour to lay in broad outlines before you what I hold to be the scientific view of a nation, and of the relationship of nations to each other. If at the very offset my statements strike you as harsh, cold, possibly immoral, I would ask you to be patient with me to the end, when some of you may perceive that the public conscience, the moral goodness which you value so highly, is established by science on a firmer and more definite, if a narrower, foundation than you are wont to suppose.

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. . . How many centuries, how many thousands of years, have the Kaffir or the Negro held large districts in Africa undisturbed by the white man? Yet their intertribal struggles have not yet produced a civilization in the least comparable with the Aryan. Educate and nurture them as you will, I do not believe that you will succeed in modifying the stock. History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on which probably so much of the Aryan's success depended.

If you bring the white man into contact with the black, you too often suspend the very process of natural selection on which the evolution of a higher type depends. You get superior and inferior races living on the same soil, and that coexistence is demoralizing for both. They naturally sink into the position of master and servant, if not admittedly or covertly into that of slave-owner and slave. Frequently they intercross, and if the bad stock be raised the good is lowered. Even in the case of Eurasians, of whom I have met mentally and physically fine specimens, I have felt how much better they would have been had they been pure Asiatics or pure Europeans. Thus it comes about that when the struggle for existence between races is suspended, the solution of great problems may be unnaturally postponed; instead of the slow, stern processes of evolution, cataclysmal solutions are prepared for the future. Such problems in suspense, it appears to me, are to be found in the Negro population of the Southern States of America, in the large admixture of Indian blood in some of the South American races, but, above all, in the Kaffir factor in South Africa.

You may possibly think that I am straying from my subject, but I want to justify natural selection to you. I want you to see selection as something which renders the inexorable law of heredity a source of progress which produces the good through suffering, an infinitely greater good which far outbalances the very obvious pain and evil. Let us suppose the alternative were possible. Let us suppose we could prevent the white man, if we liked, from going to lands of which the agricultural and mineral resources are not worked to the full; then I should say a thousand times better for him that he should not go than that he should settle down and live alongside the inferior race. The only healthy alternative is that he should go and completely drive out the inferior race. That is practically what the white man has done in North America. We sometimes forget the light that chapter of history throws on more recent experiences. Some 250 years ago there was a man who fought in our country against taxation without representation, and another man who did not mind going to prison for the sake of his religious opinions. As Englishmen we are proud of them both, but we sometimes forget that they were both considerable capitalists for their age, and started chartered companies in another continent. Well, a good deal went on in the plantations they founded, if not with their knowledge, with that at least of their servants and of their successors, which would shock us all at the present day. But I venture to say that no man calmly judging will wish either that the whites had never gone to America, or would desire that whites and Red Indians were to-day living alongside each other as Negro and white in the Southern States, as Kaffir and European in South Africa, still less that they had mixed their blood as Spaniard and Indian in South America. The civilization of the white man is a civilization dependent upon free white labour, and when that element of stability is removed it will collapse like those of Greece and Rome. I venture to assert, then, that the struggle for existence between white and red man, painful and even terrible as it was in its details, has given us a good far outbalancing its immediate evil. In place of the red man, contributing practically nothing to the work and thought of the world, we have a great nation, mistress of many arts, and able, with its youthful imagination and fresh, untrammelled impulses, to contribute much to the common stock of civilized man. Against that we have only to put the romantic sympathy for the Red Indian generated by the novels of Cooper and the poems of Longfellow, and then—see how little it weighs in the balance!

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You will see that my view—and I think it may be called the scientific view of a nation—is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle for traderoutes and for the sources of raw material and of food supply. This is the natural history view of mankind, and I do not think you can in its main features subvert it. Some of you may refuse to acknowledge it, but you cannot really study history and refuse to see its force. Some of you may realize it, and then despair of life; you may decline to admit any glory in a world where the superior race must either reject the inferior, or, mixing with it, or even living alongside it, degenerate itself. What beauty can there be when the battle is to the stronger, and the weaker must suffer in the struggle of nations and in the struggle of individual men? You may say: Let us cease to struggle; let us leave the lands of the world to the races that cannot profit by them to the full; let us cease to compete in the markets of the world. Well, we could do it, if we were a small nation living on the produce of our own soil, and a soil so worthless that no other race envied it and sought to appropriate it. We should cease to advance; but then we should naturally give up progress as a good which comes through suffering. I say it is possible for a small rural community to stand apart from the world-contest and to stagnate, if no more powerful nation wants its possessions.

But are we such a community? Is it not a fact that the daily bread of our millions of workers depends on their having somebody to work for? that if we give up the contest for trade-routes and for free markets and for waste lands, we indirectly give up our food-supply? Is it not a fact that our strength depends on these and upon our colonies, and that our colonies have been won by the ejection of inferior races, and are maintained against equal races only by respect for the present power of our empire? . . .

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Struggle of race against race, and of man against man—if this be the scientific view of life, the basis of human progress—how have human love and sympathy come to play such a great part in the world? Here, again, I think science has something to say, although the earlier interpreters of evolution rather obscured it. They painted evolution as the survival of the fittest individual, and spoke of his struggle against his fellows.

But this is not the only form of selection at work; it is often quite the least effective phase of the contest. Consciously or unconsciously, one type of life is fighting against a second type, and all life is struggling with its physical environment. The safety of a gregarious animal—and man is essentially such depends upon the intensity with which the social instinct has been developed. The stability of a race depends entirely on the extent to which the social feelings have got a real hold on it. The race which allows the physically or mentally stronger Tom to make the existence of the somewhat inferior Jack impossible will never succeed when it comes into contest with a second race. Jack has no interests in common with Tom; the oppressed will hardly get worse terms from a new master. That is why no strong and permanent civilization can be built upon slave labour, why an inferior race doing menial labour for a superior race can give no stable community; that is why we shall never have a healthy social state in South Africa until the white man replaces the dark in the fields and in the mines, and the Kaffir is pushed back towards the equator. The nation organized for the struggle must be a homogeneous whole, not a mixture of superior and inferior races. For this reason every new land we colonize with white men is a source of strength; every land of coloured men we simply rule may be needful as a source of food and mineral wealth, but it is not an element of stability in our community, and must ever be regarded with grave anxiety by our statesmen.

This need for homogeneity in a nation may be pushed further. We must not have class differences and wealth differences and education differences so great within the community that we lose the sense of common interest, and feel only the pressure of the struggle of man against man. No tribe of men can work together unless the tribal interest dominates the personal and individual interest at all points where they come into conflict. The struggle among primitive men of tribe against tribe evolved the social instinct. The tribe with the greater social feeling survived; we have to thank the struggle for existence for first making man gregarious, and then intensifying, stage by stage, the social feeling. Such is the scientific account of the origin of our social instincts; and if you come to analyze it, such is the origin of what we term morality; morality is only the developed form of the tribal habit, the custom of acting in a certain way towards our fellows, upon which the very safety of the tribe originally depended. Philosophies may be invented, the supersensuous appealed to, in order to increase the sanctions on social or moral conduct; but the natural history of morality begins with the kin-group, spreads to the tribe, to the nation, to allied races, and ultimately to inferior races and lower types of life, but ever with decreasing intensity. The demands upon the spirit of self-sacrifice which can be made by our kin, by our countrymen, by Europeans, by Chinamen, by Negroes and by Kaffirs, by animals, may not be clearly defined; but, on the average, they admit of rough graduation, and we find in practice, whatever be our fine philosophies, that the instinct to self-sacrifice wanes as we go down in the scale.

The man who tells us that he feels to all men alike, that he has no sense of kinship, that he has no patriotic sentiment, that he loves the Kaffir as he loves his brother, is probably deceiving himself. If he is not, then all we can say is that a nation of such men, or even a nation with a large minority of such men, will not stand for many generations; it cannot survive in the struggle of the nations; it cannot be a factor in the contest upon which human progress ultimately depends. The national spirit is not a thing to be ashamed of, as the educated man seems occasionally to hold. If that spirit be the mere excrescence of the music-hall, or an ignorant assertion of superiority to the foreigner, it may be ridiculous, it may even be nationally dangerous; but if the national spirit takes the form of a strong feeling of the importance of organizing the nation as a whole, of making its social and economic conditions such that it is able to do its work in the world and meet its fellows without hesitation in the field and in the market, then it seems to me a wholly good spirit—indeed, one of the highest forms of social, that is, moral instinct.


So far from our having too much of this spirit of patriotism, I doubt if we have anything like enough of it. We wait to improve the condition of some class of workers until they themselves cry out or even rebel against their economic condition. We do not better their state because we perceive its relation to the strength and stability of the nation as a whole. Too often it is done as the outcome of a blind class war. The coal-owners, the miners, the manufacturers, the mill-hands, the landlords, the farmers, the agricultural labourers, struggle by fair means, and occasionally by foul, against each other, and, in doing so, against the nation at large, and our statesmen as a rule look on. That was the correct attitude from the standpoint of the old political economy. It is not the correct attitude from the standpoint of science; for science realizes that the nation is an organized whole, in continual struggle with its competitors. You cannot get a strong and effective nation if many of its stomachs are half fed and many of its brains untrained. We, as a nation, cannot survive in the struggle for existence if we allow class distinctions to permanently endow the brainless and to push them into posts of national responsibility. The true statesman has to limit the internal struggle of the community in order to make it stronger for the external struggle. We must reward ability, but we must pay for brains, we must give larger advantage to physique; but we must not do this at a rate which renders the lot of the mediocre a wholly unhappy one. We must foster exceptional brains and physique for national purposes; but, however useful prize-cattle may be, they are not bred for their own sake, but as a step towards the improvement of the whole herd.