Up to what point can the Mongolian, and even the Jewish race, become mixed with our Aryan or Indo-Germanic races, without gradually supplanting them and causing them to disappear? This is a question I am incapable of answering. If it were only a question of the Japanese there would be no serious difficulty and the assimilation would be beneficial. But the Chinese and some other Mongolian races constitute an imminent danger for the very existence of the white races. These people eat much less than ourselves, are contented with much smaller dwellings, and in spite of this produce twice as many children and do twice as much work. The connection of this with the sexual question is not difficult to understand.
Possibly we might make a compact with the Mongols, and the Chinese in particular, which would allow both races to live on the earth without annihilating each other. I am quite convinced that we have more to fear from their blood and their work than from their arms. Some time ago experts in Far-Eastern questions predicted that the world would end by becoming Chinese.
POSITIVE TASKS
The elimination of the abuses and dangers, pointed out under the heading of negative tasks, would prepare the soil for a healthier and more ideal development of the sexual relations of humanity in the future. These require the prevention of blastophthoric deterioration of germ cells, as well as all pathological degeneration of sexual intercourse. They also require true and natural affection, free from the influences of prejudice and money, and capable of surviving amorous intoxication. Lastly, they require a natural human organization, adapted to the social welfare, the duties of parents toward their children, and the rights they have over them.
Human Selection.—This is impossible to attain without recourse to artificial means, which have hitherto been generally condemned, or employed with an unhealthy and corrupt object. I refer to the distinction between satisfaction of the sexual appetite and the procreation of children.
Although it is true that the two things are inseparably connected in plants and animals, it is equally true that the culture and social development of humanity all over the world have given rise to conditions and necessities other than those which formerly existed, conditions which at the present day are so clearly evident that they cannot be disregarded.
The struggle for existence, as it obtains between the different animal species, hardly exists any longer in man. The latter has now to fight with microbes, and other infinitely small things of the same nature. The combat between man and man, in the form of international warfare, is approaching its end. The wars of the present day, as foolish as they are formidable, are rapidly becoming absurd. We may even hope that the supreme struggle which is impending between the Aryan and Mongolian races will end in peaceful agreement.
Is it, therefore, rational to abandon the quantitative and qualitative regulation of the procreation of children to natural selection—that is to say to brutal chance, disease, famine or infanticide—at a time of human evolution when science contends with the greatest success against accident, disease, infant mortality and famine?
Our strong sexual appetite is no longer in proportion to the exigencies of procreation, nor to the means of providing food for our descendants, nor to the right of the latter to better or even tolerable existence, for the simple reason that the weak, the diseased and the children are no longer eliminated as in former times among primitive races by infanticide, epidemics, wild-beasts, neglect or war (it is now the strong and courageous who are eliminated by the latter). But it is not in our power to modify our instinctive and hereditary sexual appetite, while we have always at hand the necessary means to regulate and improve procreation.
No prejudice, no dogma, no repetition of old maxims, based on so-called immutable natural laws, can stand against such simple and elementary truths. We like to call "natural laws" what to our limited knowledge appears regular in nature. We formulate a law, and too often make an idol, instead of always making further examinations, in the light of new truths, to see if these so-called laws hold good. But the new truths are there, crying for recognition. The sheet-anchor is in our hands, in the form of measures to prevent or regulate conception.