CHAPTER XVIII
RACIAL CHANGES DURING THE HISTORIC PERIOD
We have found reason to believe that national character, as expressed in the collective mental life of any people, is only to be understood and explained when we take into account the native or racial mental qualities of the people; and we have seen reason to think that these racial qualities were in the main formed in the prehistoric or race-making period; we have noted some of the principal attempts to throw light on the prehistoric moulding of races. But these racial qualities, although very persistent, are not unalterable. We must, therefore, consider whether, and in what ways, the racial mental qualities of a people may have been changed during the nation-making or historic period. What are the factors which determine such changes? What is their influence on the destiny of nations?
The most diverse opinions are still held in regard to the question of the extent and nature of changes of innate mental qualities of peoples during the historic period, the period during which a people, or a branch of a people, attains political unity and becomes a nation.
There is no doubt that the moulding power of physical environment tends to become greatly diminished during this more settled period of the life of a people, and that, in so far as changes take place, they are determined principally by racial substitutions and by social selections within a people, rather than by the mere struggle for survival of individuals or of family groups against the inclemency of nature or against other individuals and groups.
The former of these two modes of change, substitution, has undoubtedly been effected on a large scale, producing in certain instances radical changes in the racial quality of the populations of some countries; that is to say, there has been more or less gradual substitution of one race for another, while the nation as a geographical and political entity, with its language and much of its laws, institutions, and customs, lives on without complete breach of continuity, and the people, although by blood radically changed, continues to regard itself as the same people, accepting as its own the traditions of those predecessors whom they mistakenly regard as their ancestors.
Perhaps the most striking and complete change of this sort in European history was the change of racial character of the Greek people. It is now pretty well established that the Greek population of the classical age was an incomplete blend of two of the three great European stocks, namely Homo Europaeus, the northern, fair, long-headed type of tall stature, and of H. Mediterraneus, the short dark long-headed type of the Mediterranean coast lands. The Pelasgians, who, as we now know, had achieved a civilisation of a type that was widely spread through southern Europe as long as three thousand years or more before our era, seem to have been of this Mediterranean race.
Rather more than a thousand years before our era, the Pelasgian population of Greece and the neighbouring regions began to be overrun and conquered by tribes of the fair Northern race which came in successive invasions, the Thracians, the Hellenes, the Achaeans, the Ionians, and later the Dorians. Just as, at a later period, men of the Northern race established themselves as a military aristocracy over the Celtic peoples of western Europe, so these invading tribes established themselves as a military aristocracy over the populations of Mediterranean race; and, as in the former case, so here, they intermarried largely with the people they conquered and formed an imperfectly blended population, in the upper social strata of which the fair type was predominant, in the lower strata the dark type.
From this happy blending of two races was formed the people which, under the favourable geographical and social conditions of that time and place, evolved the civilisation that culminated after six hundred years in the Athenian culture of the time of Pericles. And then, after a very short time, the whole of that splendid civilisation faded away, and the Greek people sank to a position of slight importance from which it has never again risen. After having displayed in several departments of the intellectual life a power and originality such as have never been approached by any other people, they became a people of very mediocre capacities, devoid of power of origination and purely imitative.
That this profound change in the mental qualities of the population of Greece was due to substitution of one racial stock by an inferior one is beyond question. That a great change of racial type was effected is sufficiently proved by the comparison of the physical type of the modern with that of the ancient Greeks. The modern are predominantly dark and round headed; the ancient were distinctly long headed, as shown by a sufficient number of skull measurements; and they were, as regards the dominant class at least, predominantly fair in colour. It has been supposed that the many references to the fair hair and complexion of heroes and gods were due to fair persons being very rare and hence an object of special admiration; but there is no ground for this. The way in which this racial substitution took place is also pretty clear; and the rapid, almost sudden, decline of the intellectual productivity of the Greek people coincided in time with the racial change.
The first and most important factor in the extermination of the best blood of ancient Greece was military selection. Military group selection in the prehistoric period had, no doubt, played a great part in bringing about the evolution of the superior mental qualities of the European peoples, especially of the fair northern race. So long as the peoples consisted of more or less wandering tribes of pure race, which waged a war of extermination upon one another, the peoples and tribes of superior mental and moral endowments must in the main have survived, while those of inferior endowments went under. But, so soon as the Nordic tribes became settled as aristocracies ruling over the Pelasgian populations, the effects of military selection tended to be reversed; instead of making for racial improvement, they made for deterioration. That racial deterioration occurs under these conditions seems to be an almost general law; it has been exemplified among many different peoples. The many small Greek states were almost perpetually at war with one another; and the result of the warfare was not so much the wholesale extermination of the people of any one state, as the killing off in large numbers of the younger men of the ruling caste, the free citizens of whom the armies were almost entirely composed.
The wars between Sparta and Athens were the most destructive and tragic of all in this respect. We know that the numbers of Spartans of the aristocratic class, never very large, became fewer and fewer, in spite of efforts made to keep up the number by admitting to citizenship persons not of pure Spartan blood; and that Sparta was eventually destroyed simply for lack of men, men of the ruling class[122].
In Athens and other states the depleting agencies were more numerous. Frequent wars played the same part as in Sparta; and the number of free men was further diminished by the repeated founding of colonies, in which a relatively small number of persons of Greek blood became swallowed up in a large population of mixed and inferior origin. In some states, in Athens especially, the political conditions worked powerfully in the same direction. Prominent citizens were perpetually exiled or condemned to death, sometimes in considerable batches. It is said that at certain times two-thirds of the citizens of certain states were living in exile; and the exiles, going to the colonies or other foreign lands, were for the most part lost to the Greek people.
Then, with the blooming period of Greek intellect, came the loss of the ancient religious beliefs, beliefs which had strengthened the family and made each man anxious to have many sons that the rites might be duly performed for the repose of his shade. Coinciding with this was the great increase of luxury which made large families too expensive, save for the most wealthy; while at the same time the abundance of slave labour kept down the rate of remuneration of all handicrafts, and so condemned the class of free Greek artisans to a state bordering on poverty. Hence, the free citizens of pure blood, already largely reduced in numbers, ceased to multiply; and the number of the citizens was only sustained by the admission to citizenship of foreigners, freed slaves, and various elements of different and inferior racial origins.
Hence, at the time that the battle of Chersonese was fought and the Macedonians attained the supremacy, the Greek citizens were no longer the same racial aristocracy which had produced the finest flowers of Greek culture. But the work of substitution was still only partially accomplished. In the time of the Roman domination of Greece, the remnants of the true Greek aristocracy were removed by the slave trade. Tens of thousands of Greeks of all classes were brought together to the slave markets; while those men of talent who escaped that fate emigrated to Rome to seek their fortunes by teaching the Greek language and art and philosophy. Later still came the Goths, who sacked the towns and destroyed or drove out the inhabitants. Then followed successive invasions of Slavs from the north; and lastly, the domination of the Turk well-nigh completed the extinction of the old aristocracy.
The modern Greek people is descended largely from Slav invaders and largely from the numerous and prolific slave population of the great age of Greece, but hardly at all from the men who made the greatness of that age.
Though the change and deterioration of the racial mental qualities of the Greek people by racial substitution is the most striking example in history, it is by no means the only one[123].
The substitution in that case was largely by elements drawn from other regions and peoples. But a similar substitution and consequent change of innate mental qualities may go on slowly within any people which has been formed, as have almost all the present European nations, by an incomplete blending of two or more racial stocks; it may be effected by internal selection without any introduction of new elements from any other region. Before considering an example of the process, let us note certain facts which show that there may well have taken place, throughout the historic period, changes of the composition of peoples by internal substitution or changes of the mental constitution by internal selections—that is to say, by the more rapid multiplication of certain mental types and the relative infertility of other types. Consider first the striking fact that the populations of the various European countries seem for the most part to have remained almost stationary as regards numbers, or even in some cases to have diminished greatly in numbers, throughout the period between the Roman domination and the later part of the eighteenth century. The population of Spain is said to have declined from forty millions under the Roman rule to only six millions in the year 1700 A.D. The population of Great Britain is said to have increased from five millions to six millions only during the seventeenth century; and it is certain that in the main it had increased at an even slower rate, or not at all, in the preceding centuries since the Norman Conquest; whereas in the nineteenth century it increased from thirteen millions to nearly forty millions; that is to say, it trebled itself in the century; and even that rate of increase is considerably less than the possible maximal rate.
The same is roughly true for most of the European countries; their populations, throughout great stretches of the historic period, remained stationary or increased only very slowly. Now when, during any period, a population does not multiply at the maximal physiological rate, changes of its character may well be taking place; for, in proportion as the rate of increase falls below the maximal, there is a lack of fertility in the population or in some part of it; if this relative infertility affects equally all parts and classes of the population, it will produce no change of its composition; but if it is selective, if for any reason it affects one class, or persons of some one kind of temperament or mental type, more than others, then this class or this temperament or this form of ability tends rapidly to diminish and to disappear from among that people.
The causes of the relative infertility may be divided into two classes: (1) those which operate by killing persons before they have completed their middle life; (2) those which restrict fertility without killing. Both may be selective in their action. The former kind is alone operative in determining evolution in the animal world and probably also among the less civilised peoples; but, as civilisation advances, the causes of infertility of the other kind increase constantly in effectiveness, while the former operate with less and less intensity. It is through the causes which diminish fertility merely, rather than exterminate individuals, that changes of racial quality of nations are now being, and in the future will be, principally determined. Selection of this kind is usually distinguished from the various modes of natural selection which work by extermination, by the name ‘reproductive selection.’ Briefly, natural selection operates by means of selective death rate, reproductive selection by means of selective birth rate.
No doubt, disease, especially in the form of plagues and epidemics, was one of the principal causes of the slowness of increase of population throughout the Middle Ages. And this was probably non-selective as regards mental qualities, although it was strongly selective as regards power of resistance to disease, and has left the European peoples more resistant to most diseases than any other peoples, save perhaps the Chinese[124].
But many other causes of selection were at work. Disease presumably has not affected mental qualities by selection; although by direct action and mental discouragement it may have tended to the decay of civilisations; it has been argued, for example, that malaria played a great part in the decay of classical antiquity, that it was introduced some centuries B.C. and enfeebled the population of Greece and Italy.
More interesting, from our point of view of the influences affecting the mental constitution of populations, is the effect of alcohol. Dr Archdall Reid has argued very forcibly that resistance to the attraction of alcohol is a mental peculiarity which a race only acquires through long exposure to the influence of abundant alcohol; that populations are resistant just in proportion to their past exposure to it—as is true in the main of epidemic and endemic diseases—and that in both cases this is due to selection.[125]
Much careful painstaking work by continental anthropologists seems to have proved that a change of racial composition through internal selection has been and still is going on in both the German and French people. The facts have been worked out by O. Ammon[126], Hensen and De Lapouge[127]. They show, chiefly by means of the comparison of the forms of large numbers of skulls, that throughout the historic period the French and German peoples have been becoming more and more round headed, that the type of Homo Alpinus, the short dark round-headed race, has been gaining upon the type of Homo Europaeus.
We have seen that the latter stock of the fair northern type constituted the upper class among the Gauls of Caesar’s time; and the invasions of Franks and Normans must have added considerably to their numbers; yet, in spite of that, the mental and physical characters of this race are said by these authors to be now very much rarer than formerly, owing to the internal selections which have favoured the Alpine type. These took the following forms. In the first place, in the early Middle Ages, it is said, the Nordic type, being a military aristocracy, suffered, as in ancient Greece, proportionally far greater losses in warfare than the Alpine type. Secondly, the severe persecutions of Protestants in France drove into exile, besides killing many others, large numbers who were for the most part of the fair race, because, as we have seen, this race does not easily remain content within the Roman Church. It is said, for example, that, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, so large a number of Protestants passed into Prussia that the rise of Prussia as a powerful State was the immediate consequence, with of course an equivalent loss to France. De Lapouge considers this the greatest blow that France has suffered in the historic period. Normandy alone, it is reported, sent 200,000 Protestants to Prussia. But the most important and curious factor has been, according to De Lapouge, what he calls the selection by towns. He shows, by comparison of masses of anthropological observations, that the Nordic type has been predominantly attracted to the towns (which fact he attributes to their more restless enterprising character) while the dark type has been more content to lead the quiet agricultural life[128]. He points out that the town-life stimulates to a new struggle for adaptation, from which differentiation of classes results; the longheads maintain their numbers better and rise in the social scale. Further, he shows that town-life makes against fertility, owing to a number of psychological influences—the stimulation of ambition and of the intellect, the luxurious habits, the weakening of family life, the break with the past and its family traditions, the uncertainty of the future, the weakening of religious sanctions; and he gives reason to believe that in this way the towns have been, through many generations, weeding out the elements of the fair race and determining an ever increasing predominance of Homo Alpinus.
In order to understand the importance of these internal selections, it is necessary to realise that their effects are cumulative in a high degree, when the same influences continue to work through many generations. Thus, if within any people there are two equally numerous classes of persons of different mental constitution, A and B, and if these constitutions determine that the one group A has a net birth rate of three children per pair of adults, while the other B has a birth rate of four per pair of parents; then, in the third generation after one century, the numbers of the two classes, other things being the same for both, will be as ten to sixteen. After two centuries the one class will be more than twice as numerous as the other; and after three centuries the numbers of the class A will constitute about fifteen per cent, only of the whole population. Late marriage is also very important. Suppose that of two classes, A marries at 35, and B at 25 years, and that each produces four children per marriage; then (other things being the same) after three and a half centuries B becomes four times as numerous as A. These two factors generally work together.
But, apart from the change of racial composition of a heterogeneous nation by internal selection of this sort, changes of the constitution of even a racially homogeneous people may be produced through selection affecting persons of particular mental tendencies. One of the most striking instances of this is the elimination of the religious tendencies from the constitution of a people by negative selection through the action of the Roman Church[129]. For many centuries the Roman Church has attracted to her service very large numbers of those who were by nature most religiously minded, and it has imposed celibacy upon them, it has forbidden them to transmit their natural piety to descendants. In Protestant countries this process of negative selection of the religious tendencies was continued for a much briefer period than in the Catholic countries. It is maintained with much plausibility that we may see the result in the fact that sincere and natural piety is far commoner in the Protestant countries than in the Roman Catholic; that in the two countries Italy and Spain, in which the influence of the Roman Church has been greater than in any others, the people are now the least religiously minded of any in Europe; that with them religion has become purely formal and external, that the mass of the people, though outwardly conforming, is absolutely irreligious; that in fact this form of religion tends to exterminate itself in the long run by insisting upon that form of reproductive selection[130].
Another striking instance of the incidence of negative selection upon certain mental qualities of a people is afforded by the history of Spain. In the sixteenth century Spain attained to a supreme position of power and grandeur among the nations of the world, such as has been rivalled by Rome alone in all history; and then very rapidly her power decayed, and ever since she has remained one of the most backward of European peoples, contributing little to European culture, to science, art or philosophy, incapable of developing without the aid of foreigners her rich industrial resources, impotent in war, entirely devoid of enterprise and originality. To what is this great change due?
It is not due to any adverse change of climate, to devastation by war or plague or famine, nor is it due to any change in geographical or economic relations. Spain remains more happily situated as a centre of commerce than any other country of the world. The mass of the people remains vigorous, proud, and virile. It is the intellect of the nation alone which has decayed, or rather it is the intellectual life of the nation that has become utterly stagnant.
Buckle drew a vivid picture of the stagnation of the Spanish intellect and sought the explanation of it in the great power wielded by the Roman Catholic Church, which, he said, had successfully fostered the spirit of protection and superstition, had discouraged every effort of the intellect, and utterly repressed the spirit of inquiry, to the free activity of which all progress of civilisation was, in his opinion, due. Here, again, modern science shows that Buckle was led into error by his ignorance of the importance of the biological factors, the racial qualities and the changes produced in them by selection.
Galton and, still more fully, Fouillée have shown that the stagnation of the intellect of the Spanish people and the consequent decay of the power and glory of Spain have been chiefly due to the fact that the people of Spain ceased to produce those men of exceptional mental endowments, of intellectual energy and enterprise and independence of character, on whom primarily depend the power and prosperity of any nation and who are the most essential factors in the progress of the civilisation of any people, who in short are essential for the growth and endurance of national mind and character. And this was because during some centuries intellectual power, enterprise, and energy were steadily weeded out by a rigorous process of negative selection. In the first place, the Church, having attained enormous power, became in two ways a tremendous agency of negative selection. First, she made celibate priests of a very large proportion of all those whose natural bent was towards the things of the mind, multiplying monastic orders excessively. Secondly, by means of the Inquisition she destroyed with fire and sword or drove into exile through many generations all those who would not conform to her narrow creed, who combined intellectual power with independence and originality of spirit and a firm will. In addition she drove out all the Jews and all of Moorish origin.
The second mode of negative selection, namely persecution exerted by the Church, was no doubt the more important, but the former also must have had a great effect. We are helped to realize the probable magnitude of the effect by reflection on facts set out in an article by Bishop Welldon[131]. He shows the great part played in English civilisation since the reformation by the sons of the English Clergy; including as they did a number of men of the highest achievements in all departments of our national life. If all those sons of clergy who have shown exceptional abilities, and all their descendants, had by the rule of celibacy been prevented from coming into existence, how disastrous would that have been for the English people, how much less successful and vigorous would the nation have become!
A second powerful agency of negative selection was the immense colonial empire which Spain so rapidly acquired, especially her American conquests. The whole people was seized with the desire to enrich themselves with the gold of the New World, and was fascinated by the idea of imitating the romantic adventures of Cortes and Pizarro. Great numbers of the bolder and most capable spirits set out for the New World, and there either lost their lives or remained to mix their blood with that of the native Indians or the imported negroes. In either case their stock was lost to the mother country.
The third and culminating cause was the career of military aggression pursued by Charles V; this completed the extermination of the aristocracy of ability and finally plunged Spain into an intellectual torpor which has persisted ever since and from which she can only be raised up by a succession of men of first-rate intellect and character: men such as she seems incapable of producing, because her people has thus been drained of all its most valuable elements, because her eugenic stocks have been exterminated.
The fall of Spain illustrates not only the operation of internal social selection affecting certain mental qualities; it illustrates also once more, even more clearly than the fall of Greece, the fact that the civilisation of a people and its power and position in the world depend altogether upon its intellectual aristocracy, and that the fall of a people from a high place necessarily follows the failure to continue to produce such an aristocracy.
In the civilised nations of the modern world, the most important kind of selection at work at the present time is what is distinguished as ‘economic selection’ working in conjunction with the formation of the social classes. It has no doubt operated at various times among other civilised peoples, but never so strongly and universally as at present.
All the leading civilised nations have passed, in the eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth centuries, through a period in which the discoveries of science have enormously increased the productive powers of man and man’s control over, and power of resistance to, the forces of nature. The result has been that everywhere civilised populations have multiplied at a great rate, in a way that has never before occurred. But now this period seems to have definitely come to an end, and to have been succeeded by a new period characterised by three features which threaten to exert a most deleterious effect upon the innate mental qualities of peoples.
(1) The world is becoming filled up; the untouched wealth of enormous territories no longer lies open to the grasp of the bold and enterprising. The coloured races are entering into the economic competition in the way foreshadowed by the late C. H. Pearson[132]. The high organisation of every form of economic activity renders the competition for wealth everywhere extremely severe. And at the same time men have come to regard as necessities of life what, but a few generations ago, were the luxuries of the wealthy or unknown even to them; that is to say, the standard of comfort has risen greatly. The combined result of these changes is the increased difficulty of maintaining a family in the upper strata of society.
(2) There has been a great development of humanitarian sentiment, one result of which has been the breaking down of class-barriers and the perfecting of the social ladder; at the same time it has produced such changes of our laws and institutions as tend in an ever increasing degree to lighten the economic burdens of the poor and to consummate by social organisation the abolition of natural selection; that is to say, these changes are putting a stop to the repression by natural laws of the multiplication of the less fit, those least well endowed mentally and physically. The recent great decline of infant mortality is one evidence of this.
(3) The influence of religion and custom has weakened, and men are more disposed to adopt the naturalistic point of view, to believe that this life is not a mere preparation for an infinitely longer life elsewhere, but that it is all they can certainly reckon upon and, therefore, is to be made the most of; while at the same time they are oppressed by the severity of the economic competition and by a sense of the lack of any ultimate purpose, end, or sanction of human effort.
The combined result of these three changes is a strong tendency to reverse the operation by which nature has secured the evolution of higher types of mind—namely, by breeding in the main from the higher types in each generation. We see a tendency for the population to be renewed in each generation preponderantly from the mentally inferior elements, those whose outlook hardly extends beyond the immediate future and who have not learnt to demand for themselves and their children favoured positions in the great game of life. The effects of these three changes operate in the following manner. The rate of reproduction, the birth rate, of nearly all civilised countries is falling rapidly (although the death rate also falls). This diminution of rate of reproduction is due to increase of celibacy, abstention from marriage, to increase of late marriage, and to voluntary restriction of the number of the family in marriage.
Now, it is shown statistically that this falling off of fertility chiefly affects the classes above the average of ability, the upper and middle classes and also the superior part of the artisan classes[133]. These classes have been formed and are maintained by the operation of social and economic competition; they have long been, and are still, perpetually recruited in each generation from the lower strata, by the rise into them of the abler members of the lower strata. Hence, economic selection, under our present social system, seems to be working strongly for the mental deterioration of the most highly civilised peoples; the social ladder, becoming more nearly perfect, perpetually drains the mass of a people of its best members, enabling them to rise to the upper strata where they tend to become infertile[134]. Galton and Prof. Karl Pearson have insisted most strongly upon these tendencies. But they have not escaped the notice of continental authors. M. Jacobi[135] has written a large volume packed with historical illustrations to prove inductively the law that aristocracies always die out, or are only maintained by constant recruiting from below, or in other words that aristocracies tend to become infertile. And the modern tendency which we have just now considered under the head of economic selection may be regarded as falling under the head of this law, a case of the extension of the law to democratic communities and the natural aristocracies of ability which are generated in them.
We may perhaps state the principal causes of this tendency in general terms as follows: the acquirement by any class of leisure, culture, and the habit of reflection (the malady of thought) partially emancipates that class from the empire of instinct, custom, and the religious sanctions of morality; and these are the great conservative agencies under the influence of which men not so emancipated continue to multiply according to the law of nature. These instincts, customs, and religious sanctions of morality, which lead men to multiply freely, have been acquired for the good of the race or of the society considered as an organism whose life is of indefinitely long duration; and in some respects they are opposed to the pleasure and welfare of the individual life. The habit of reason and reflection tends to lead men to act for their own immediate welfare, rather than for the future welfare of the race or of society, and to refuse to make those sacrifices of ease and to undertake those responsibilities and efforts which the care of a family imposes and which alone can secure the welfare of the future generations. It is in respect to these duties that the great antagonism between religion and reason appears in its most significant aspect.
The tendency for the upper classes to die out and to be replaced constantly from the lower social strata by the aid of the social ladder is no doubt stronger now than in foregoing ages. But it has always been operative; and this is widely recognised; while the comfortable inference has often been drawn that the process is not only inevitable but actually beneficial and desirable. It is said that the upper classes inevitably become effete, and that the lower constitute an inexhaustible reservoir of mental and moral excellences, from which they are and can be indefinitely renewed; and thus the population is always rising in the social scale, a state of affairs which makes for social happiness.
But, if we take a longer view, the prospect is not so comforting; it seems only too probable that this constant dying away of society at the top and the renewal of the upper strata from the lower, by the agency of the social ladder, must sooner or later result in a serious deterioration of the lower strata, at least in draining it of its best stocks. There is also a return or downward current of less strength, which returns to the lower strata the failures, the incompetents, and the degenerates of the upper. And these two currents must, it would seem, in the course of ages render it impossible for the lower strata to continue to supply the superior elements required to maintain the upper. If and when that stage is reached, national decay must set in.
In England, where the operation of the social ladder has been more effective and of longer duration than in any other country, there are indications that this stage is at hand. Our social ladder has provided and still provides a splendid array of talent, but already it has produced, as its complement, a large mass of very inefficient population. Foreign observers are constantly impressed with this; Mr Collier Price[136], for example, tells us that the million best of our population is the finest in the world; but that our lowest stratum is the most degraded and hopelessly inefficient.
Looking at the course of history widely, we may see, then, in the differentiation of social classes by the social ladder and in the tendency of the upper strata to fail to reproduce themselves, an explanation of the cyclic course of civilisation. This has been ascribed by some authors[137] to race-crossing, followed by blending, and ultimately by stagnation consequent upon complete blending and the flowering period which coincides with it. But we now have a more adequate explanation of the decay which follows upon the blooming period. It is not mere stagnation, resulting from the achievement of social harmony and the relaxation of efforts at social adaptation and achievement of all kinds. The decline is probably due as much, and perhaps in a much higher degree, to the exhaustion of the mass of the population, the completion of the draining process by which, throughout the whole period of the development of the cycle of civilisation, the best elements and strains have been drained off from the lower strata, brought to the top, and strained off.
It is interesting to speculate on the possible effect on this process of the fact that we are becoming more clearly conscious of these tendencies and subjecting them to scientific inquiry. Already the legislature has taken one small step of a eugenic nature and is soon to take another. The important thing is that we should recognise that men are not the helpless sport of blind forces, that mankind can control its own destiny in ever increasing degree as knowledge grows.
A word may be said in regard to sexual selection, which probably played a part in the evolution of the mental capacities of men. It would seem that, in the peoples among whom monogamy is the rule, it no longer operates to any appreciable degree. With the general excess of females, we could suppose that it still tended to race improvement only if the unmarried women were on the whole distinctly inferior to the married. But, if there is any difference, it is probably the other way; because the most able women are more and more attracted into independent careers. The further the so-called emancipation of women goes, the more will this be the case.
Civilisation, then, tends from the first to put an end to that elimination of the less fit individuals by the severities of Nature which we call natural selection; and, as soon as it has passed beyond its earliest stages, it brings to an end also the mortal conflicts of social groups and the consequent group selection, which was in all probability a main factor of racial progress in the prehistoric period. It abolishes also at an early stage the improving influence of sexual selection, which was probably the third principal condition of the development of the higher powers of mankind.
Civilisation replaces these modes of selection, which make for improvement of the racial qualities of peoples, by a number of modes of social selection, nearly all of which must have been, so far as we can see, negative or reversed selections—that is, selections making for deterioration of the mental qualities of the civilised peoples. In place of natural selection, group selection, and sexual selection, we have had at work, within each people in increasing degrees, various forms of social selection—military selection, selection by the towns, selection by the church, political selection with its exiles and its colonial system, and lastly economic selection, which has become exceedingly influential in recent years among ourselves. And all these, so far as can be seen, have operated mainly, among some peoples and in some ages very powerfully, to diminish the fertility of the best elements of the population and so to produce actual retrogression of the average intellectual capacity of peoples, and especially to deprive them of eugenic stocks, the stocks which were most fertile in individuals of exceptional capacity on whom the progress of civilisation and the relative power of nations chiefly depend.
M. de Lapouge’s investigations of the matter have led him to a very melancholy conclusion. He attaches especial importance to urban selection, as he calls it, in weeding out the best stocks. He writes—“There is no more agonising question than that of the exhaustion of our intellectual reserves by the influence of city-life. The public and our statesmen do not suspect it. But nevertheless it is the great danger of modern societies and especially of France. Of all the devastating influences which we have called social selections, selection by the town makes most powerfully for deterioration of peoples. Our towns are destroying all of the intelligent and energetic that have been spared us by the long centuries of disastrous selections. France has lost in the past almost all her dolicho-blond elements, and now are disappearing those of mixed stock and the best of the short-headed type. In all the continent of Europe the hour is at hand when there will remain only the inert and used up débris of our dead nations, pitiable remnants who will be the prey of unknown conquerors. Thus perished the Hellenic world, thus will perish the whole of our civilisation, if man does not make application of his knowledge of the principles of heredity, that tremendous power which to-day is bringing death and stagnation, but by the control of which science will enable us to secure safety and national vigour[138].”
It is possible that this conclusion gives too dark a picture of the tendencies of social selection in the civilised nations; but it does seem probable that with the advance of civilisation the tendency to reversed selection becomes strong[139]. We are at any rate compelled to conclude that it is impossible to discover evidence of any influences that can have made at all strongly for progressive evolution of intellectual capacity during the historic period; whereas a number of forms of selection seem to have worked against it and must at least have counterbalanced any factors making for improvement, and that therefore no advance has taken place in intellectual capacity but more probably some deterioration has already occurred.
The conclusion thus reached deductively is well borne out by the small amount of inductive evidence that is available. Such comparison as we can make between the leading modern nations and the civilised nations of antiquity tends rather to show that both as regards the average man, and as regards the intellectual endowment of exceptional men and the proportion of such men produced, the advantage lies with the ancient peoples. And the comparison of skull capacity or size of brain decidedly supports this conclusion. It has been found by a number of anthropologists that the average skull capacity of men of the late Stone Age in Europe was equal to, or greater than, that of modern Europeans. And in the main, on the large average, intellectual capacity varies with the size of the brain.
Our seeming intellectual superiority is a superiority of the traditional store of intellectual gains, a superiority of knowledge and of the instruments of the intellect, of language, and of the methods of mental operation by which knowledge is obtained, especially the mathematical and scientific methods in general[140]. Consider a single example frequently quoted to show the intellectual inferiority of the modern savage. It is said—Here is a poor savage who cannot count above ten without the help of his fingers and toes or other tallies; and we generally forget that we also should be incapable of counting above ten, had not our ancestors slowly devised the system of enumeration or verbal counting, and that, given such a system, the poor savage would be able to count as well as any of us.
The reader may be prepared to accept this conclusion as regards the intellectual capacities of mankind, and yet may be inclined to say—Surely the civilised peoples have progressed as regards their moral qualities throughout the historic period! Let us, therefore, consider this point separately for a moment.
Is there reason to believe that there has been progress of the innate moral disposition during the historic period? Here we are on still more difficult ground than when we considered the question of the progress of innate intellectual capacity.
The essence of the higher morality is the predominance of the altruistic motives over the egoistic, in the deliberately reasoned control of conduct. But morality in this sense is relatively rare in every age, and the great mass of moral conduct of men in general is the issue of mental processes of a simpler kind; it consists in doing what one believes to be right, in acting according to what one believes to be one’s duty; no matter how that belief may have been arrived at. The tendency to do what one believes to be right, which for the vast majority of men has always been simply the tendency to conform to the code of morals accepted by his society, has an innate basis which may properly be called the social or moral disposition. At present I am not concerned to define the elements of our nature which make up the moral disposition[141]. The morality of a people, objectively considered, is the outcome of the interaction between their moral disposition, on the one hand, and the moral environment of the individuals, on the other; and the latter consists of two parts: (1) the traditional system of precepts, customs, laws, in short the code: (2) the traditional system of sanctions by which the code is upheld and enforced.
If we compare, in respect to this moral nature, the members of primitive societies with those of highly civilised societies, applying simply the criterion of conformity of conduct to the accepted code, we shall be impelled to the conclusion that the former, the savages and barbarians, have in general the moral nature much more highly developed than the members of civilised societies; for they conform on the whole very much more strictly to their moral codes. But such a conclusion would be hardly fair to the civilised peoples; first, because their social environment is more complex, so that the bearing of their moral code is less simple and direct; it is less easily obeyed, because its teachings are more generalised in form and do not provide clear irresistible rulings for all or any large proportion of the much greater variety of situations with which individuals find themselves confronted. Secondly, because the code is a higher one and makes greater demands upon the self-control of individuals. Thirdly, because not only is the code less clear and direct, but also the sanctions of conduct, civil and religious, are generally less obvious and immediate; and the effectiveness of both code and sanctions is weakened by the co-existence, within complex civilised societies, of more or less rival codes and systems of sanctions, which inevitably weaken the authority of one another; whereas the code and sanctions of the savage or barbarous society reign absolutely and without rivalry, so that men are not led to question their authority.
The conditions of moral conduct are, then, so different as to forbid any attempt to compare the innate moral dispositions of primitive and civilised peoples; and all we can do, in order to arrive at an opinion, is to consider whether the conditions have been such as to favour the evolution of the moral disposition, the innate basis of the social tendencies, during the nation-making period.
There can, I think, be no doubt that the principal condition of the evolution of the moral nature was group selection among primitive societies constantly at war with one another. In conflicts of that kind it must have been the solidarity of each group, resting upon the moral dispositions of individuals, the tendency of each individual to conform to the law and moral code of the society and to stand loyally by his leaders and comrades, which, more than anything else, determined success and survival in the struggle of the group for existence. At first, the nature of the code must have been of relatively small importance; the all important condition of survival of the group must have been the strict obedience to it on the part of the members of the group.
This is not a deduction only from general principles. One may observe the effect of tribal conflict, on comparing, in various parts of the world, tribes that have long been subjected to its influence with closely allied tribes that have long led a peaceful existence[142].
At a later stage, as the traditional codes of morality became differentiated and more complex with the increasing complexity of societies, the nature of these codes must have acquired an increasing influence in determining group survival; but it must still have been subordinate in importance to the degree of development of the moral disposition; for a society with an inferior moral code, strictly conformed to by its members, would in the long run have better chances of survival than one with a higher code less strictly observed. Hence, the higher more difficult codes could only be attained by those peoples among whom the instinctive basis of social conduct had become highly evolved by a long process of group selection.
But, on passing into the stage of settled societies of large extent, that is to say, as peoples passed from the stage of tribal organisation to that of national organisation, the evolution of the social disposition through the mortal conflict of groups must have tended to come to an end; because group selection became less active, the conflicts between the larger and less numerous societies or groups became rarer and also less fatal to the vanquished societies. In other words, during the historic period failure in conflict has not usually meant extermination; national cultures and the power and glory of nations have come and gone, but the various peoples, the units of conflict, have in the main survived their failures and persisted in living. Group selection, the main condition of evolution of the social disposition, has, therefore, been abolished; and of the various forms of social selection operating within societies, the chief of which we have briefly noticed, no one seems to have been of a nature to produce further evolution of the social disposition; all of them must rather have operated adversely to it. Military selection, selection by the Church’s rule of celibacy, political selection—all these must have fallen most heavily on the individuals in whom the social disposition was strong, whose conduct was influenced largely by the sense of duty, and less by the individual impulses and desires.
We may conclude, then, with some confidence that there has not been further evolution of the innate moral disposition in the historic period. This conclusion is greatly at variance with popular conceptions; we are apt to pride ourselves upon our superior morality; to point to our humanitarian laws and institutions, to our tenderness for the weak, the poor, and the suffering; to our regard even for the welfare of savage peoples, whom we no longer deliberately exterminate, and for domestic animals; and to suppose that all this shows modern civilised men to be innately superior in morality to their ancestors and to the barbarous peoples. But our conclusion that the difference implies merely an evolution of moral tradition, not of moral nature, will appear probable if we reflect upon the fact that a widespread change of this kind in respect to some department of conduct has sometimes been produced within a very short space of time, even within the lifetime of one generation. Take the attitude of Englishmen towards slavery and the African slave trade. It is hardly more than half a century since large numbers of Englishmen, or men of English origin, owned great gangs of slaves or drew their wealth from slave labour; yet now most of us look with horror upon slavery of every kind. Take the case of kindness to domestic animals. It is a comparatively recent tradition; and, within the memories of those who are not yet middle-aged, a great improvement has taken place. Again, there are many persons who, while tender to their domestic animals, are entirely brutal where wild animals are concerned, since public opinion or traditional morality does not yet bear so strongly upon our relations to them. Again, it is not long since in our factories, our prisons, our schools, the most horrible tortures were applied to our fellow citizens without provoking any protest; while now we display perhaps an excessive tenderness and have passed law after law to protect the feeble against the strong.
The mental development of peoples in the historic period has, therefore, not consisted in, nor been caused by, nor in all probability has it been accompanied by, any appreciable evolution of innate intellectual or moral capacities beyond the degrees achieved in the race-making period, before the modern nations began to take shape. There is no reason to think that we are intellectually or morally superior by nature to our savage ancestors. Such superiority of morals and intellectual power as we enjoy has resulted from the improvement and extension of the intellectual and moral traditions and the accompanying evolution of social organisation.
A different conclusion was reached by the late Benjamin Kidd in his Social Evolution, which has enjoyed a very wide circulation[143], and it seems worth while therefore to examine very briefly the author’s position. Mr Kidd saw clearly and argued convincingly that the innate intellectual capacities have not improved during the historic period; but he held that the innate moral tendencies have been greatly improved during this period; or rather he distinguished between the innate moral tendencies and the innate religious tendencies; and, while rejecting Herbert Spencer’s view that the moral tendencies (as thus arbitrarily distinguished from the religious tendencies) are slowly becoming improved and strengthened in the civilised peoples, he held that the innate religious tendencies are being greatly improved and strengthened; and he regarded this as the underlying condition of all ‘social evolution.’ In support of his view he cited an impressive array of facts illustrating the general softening of manners and morals among the civilised peoples, especially the legislative changes which have given political power to the masses of the people. That these evidences of a general softening of manners and a great extension of social sympathy are very striking we must all agree; but Kidd advanced no serious argument in favour of his contention that these changes have been due to some change or improvement of the innate qualities of the peoples among whom they have appeared. And he did not suggest any way in which this alleged improvement or accentuation of the innate religious tendencies may have been brought about. He attributed it wholly to the influence of the Christian religion. Now, if Kidd had accepted the Lamarckian principle of the transmission of acquired tendencies or effects of use and habit, he might reasonably have attributed the alleged improvement to such influence. But he sternly rejected that principle and proclaimed himself a rigid exponent of the Neo-Darwinian school, which attributes all racial changes to selection. He even assumed the truth of the doctrine that, in the absence of selective processes making for its improvement, every race must inevitably degenerate. It might, then, have been expected that he would have attempted to show how Christianity can be supposed to have favoured the improvement by selection of the innate religious tendencies. Yet he made no attempt in this direction. He seems to have been aware that his view encounters a great difficulty in the fact that Christianity powerfully swayed the peoples of Europe for many centuries during which little or no progress in civilisation was effected, whereas rapid and accelerating progress of many kinds has marked the last three centuries. He sought to meet this difficulty by attributing the rapid progress of recent centuries to the influence of the Protestant form of Christianity, alleging that it promotes the evolution of the religious tendencies more powerfully than other forms. Yet this view of the matter, even if it were acceptable, would leave the Reformation itself quite unexplained. Kidd seems to hint that, throughout the earlier centuries of the dominance of the Christian religion in Europe, it was slowly effecting the alleged improvement of the religious tendencies in the mass of the people, without these being able to manifest themselves in social life, until they somehow broke loose at the time of the Reformation and began for the first time to operate on a great scale and with tremendous force. The view might have some plausibility coming from the mouth of a disciple of Lamarck, but it cannot be reconciled with Kidd’s strictly Neo-Darwinian principles. There is, then, nothing in Kidd’s grandiloquent and loosely reasoned, but always interesting pages, to justify any belief in the improvement of the innate moral disposition during the historic period[144].
Before leaving this difficult question of the extent and nature of changes in the innate qualities of peoples during the historic period, I would define in the following way the position that seems to me to be well founded. There have been no considerable changes of innate qualities; and what changes have occurred have probably been of the nature of retrogression, rather than of advance or improvement; and this is true of both intellectual and moral qualities. The improvements of civilised peoples are wholly improvements of the intellectual and moral traditions. All the great and obvious changes of social life are in the main changes of these traditions. Nevertheless, such differences of innate qualities as exist between the different peoples are very important, because of their cumulative influence upon their traditions. And, especially, the innate superiorities of the leading peoples, though relatively small, are of essential significance; and it is of the first importance for the future prosperity of the great nations of the present time that they should not suffer any deterioration of their innate qualities; for they alone have attained just such a level of innate excellence as renders possible the existence of civilisation and the growth and continued progress of great nations. Especially is it essential that they should continue to produce in large numbers those persons of exceptional moral and intellectual endowments, whose influence alone can maintain the vitality of the national traditions and who alone can add anything of value to them.