(1) “If the various checks specified in the two last paragraphs, and perhaps others as yet unknown, do not prevent the reckless, the vicious, and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has too often occurred in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule. It is very difficult to say why one civilised nation rises, becomes more powerful, and spreads more widely, than another; or why the same nation progresses more quickly at one time than at another. We can only say that it depends on an increase in the actual number of the population, on the number of the men endowed with high intellectual and moral faculties, as well as on their standard of excellence. Corporeal structure appears to have little influence, except so far as vigour of body leads to vigour of mind.”—Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871.
(2) Referring to “the rates with which the various classes of society (classified according to civic usefulness) have contributed to the population at various times, in ancient and modern nations,” Mr. Francis Galton said “there is strong reason for believing that national rise and decline is closely connected with this influence.”—Galton, Sociological Papers, 1904, p. 47.
(3) “The inexplicable decline and fall of nations following from no apparent external cause receives instant light from the relative fertility of the fitter and unfitter elements combined with what we now know of the laws of inheritance.”[82]—Pearson, 1904.
(4) To the question, What were the causes of the fall of Rome? Mr. Balfour replies, “I feel disposed to answer, Decadence.”[83]—Balfour, 1908.
The lecture of which the previous chapter is the written form was prepared and delivered before I had an opportunity of seeing Mr. A. J. Balfour's lecture on “Decadence” delivered a few days before. That has since been printed, and is well worthy of our attention. In Mr. Balfour we have a representative political thinker, an experimental statesman and, furthermore, a former President of the British Association, deeply interested in, and favourably disposed towards, scientific enquiry and the scientific method. Further, this lecture has been widely noticed, though all the criticisms I have seen seem to me to miss the point. No apology, then, is necessary for a special discussion of this most suggestive lecture in direct relation with the foregoing theory of its subject.
Political and national decadence is Mr. Balfour's theme, and we note first that here is a contemporary thinker, not unread in recent biology, including the work of Weismann, who is prepared to make use of the idea that societies are inherently mortal, as individuals are. One wonders when we shall be rid of this pernicious instance of the argument from analogy, which is already much more than two thousand years old.
Next it may be noticed that, though Mr. Balfour has deliberately discussed the idea of natural selection, he has been led wholly astray from its true relation to the question under discussion by reason of falling into the common error which Sir E. Ray Lankester has recently exposed, as Huxley did several decades ago. Mr. Balfour conceives natural selection to issue from the struggle for existence between species or societies. It has already been pointed out that the all-important natural selection is not between species or societies but within them. The struggle for existence is fought out mainly between the immature individuals of any species or society. Its issue determines the survivors for parenthood and the future. Mr. Balfour must have read Professor Ray Lankester's recent Romanes Lecture in which all this is so clearly shown, but he has unfortunately retained the popular conception of natural selection as acting between species or societies, and has in consequence failed, I will not say to find, but even to discuss in any adequate measure, the theory of racial and national decadence, defined in the preceding chapter. He merely discusses “competition between groups of communities,” and rightly finds it inadequate to account for the great tragedies of history.
There follows a passage which may be heartily assented to, on the very grounds on which the entire lecture may be welcomed, namely, that it suggests the inadequacy of the common explanations of national decadence advanced by historians. Says Mr. Balfour:—
“It is in vain that historians enumerate the public calamities which preceded, and no doubt contributed to, the final catastrophe. Civil dissensions, military disasters, pestilences, famines, tyrants, tax-gatherers, growing burdens, and waning wealth—the gloomy catalogue is unrolled before our eyes, yet somehow it does not in all cases wholly satisfy us: we feel that some of these diseases are of a kind which a vigorous body politic should easily be able to survive, that others are secondary symptoms of some obscurer malady, and that in neither case do they supply us with the full explanation of which we are in search.”