One must heartily thank the author for the abundant demonstration which follows, well warranting our feeling that these explanations do not suffice—nor yet, in the case of Rome, diminution of population, nor the “brutalities of the gladiatorial shows,” nor “the gratuitous distribution of bread to the urban mobs,” nor yet slavery, lately declared, by Mr. W. R. Paterson, in his Nemesis of Nations, to be the cause of the fall of empires. As Mr. Balfour says, “Who can believe that this immemorial custom could, in its decline, destroy the civilisation which, in its vigour, it had helped to create?” It would have been more important, perhaps, to consider, as Mr. Balfour does not, the latest view, advanced by Professor Ronald Ross, that the incursion of malaria may have had something to do with the fall of Rome.
Mr. Balfour's theory—decadence the cause of decadence.—Mr. Balfour then falls back upon “decadence "as the explanation, and to the critic of this elegant hypothesis that decadence is due to decadence, replies that it is something to recognise the possibility of "subtle changes in the social tissues of old communities.” One regrets all the more that he should not have considered anti-eugenic practices as possibly accounting for these subtle changes. One must, however, quote the excellent passage in which Mr. Balfour supports his use of the word decadence, though one utterly disagrees with the suggestion that the term “old age” might be its equivalent. He says: “The facile generalisations with which we so often season the study of dry historic fact; the habits of political discussion which induce us to catalogue for purposes of debate the outward signs that distinguish (as we are prone to think) the standing from the falling state, hide the obscurer, but more potent, forces which silently prepare the fate of empires.”
We may note with interest (and surely with surprise when we consider Japan and Spain and the China of to-morrow), Mr. Balfour's rejection of the doctrine that “arrested progress, and even decadence, may be but the prelude to a new period of vigorous growth. So that even those races or nations which seem frozen into eternal immobility may base upon experience their hopes of an awakening spring.” It is, I fancy, Mr. Balfour's fondness for the Platonic idea of senility in the race as in the individual, that leads him to question what can surely be no longer denied. Thus a little later we find him saying, “If civilisations wear out, and races become effete, why should we expect to progress indefinitely, why for us alone is the doom of man to be reversed?”
Nowhere in this lecture is there any recognition of what, I confess, seems to me to be an obvious and necessary truth, the distinction between the two kinds of progress—racial progress due to the choice of the best for parenthood, and acquired or traditional progress. It may be suggested that no one can usefully discuss decadence or progress until he has seen and perceived this absolutely cardinal distinction, suggested in my Royal Institution lectures in February, 1907, as one of the great lessons taught by the study of biology to the student of progress.
Mr. Balfour does indeed avoid all those false solutions which depend upon a Lamarckian belief in the transmission of acquired characters. This, however, instead of leading him to insist upon the Darwinian contribution to the study of decadence—the idea of selection—causes him to regard the racial question as unimportant. He notes one or two of the fashions in which the quality of a race may be modified, thus influencing national character, and then dismisses this question (wherein, as I cannot doubt, everything material lies) with the remark, “But such changes are not likely, I suppose, to be considerable, except perhaps those due to the mixture of races—and that only in new countries.”—Reaching page 45, the reader finds himself confident that now at length the writer has put his finger on the crux of the problem. Yet that is how he dismisses it; adding, indeed, to make it quite clear, the following words: “The flexible element in any society, that which is susceptible of progress or decadence, must therefore be looked for rather in the physical and psychical conditions affecting the life of its component units, than in their inherited constitution.”
Not a word as to cessation of selection! This omission, which is, indeed, the omission of the fact of decadence, mainly depends, one fancies, upon that erroneous conception of natural selection as acting between species and societies rather than within them, which for so many decades the biologist has been at pains to correct. One would indeed have thought that, for a scholar and student like Mr. Balfour, Wordsworth's great sonnet would have sufficed to set up a train of thought which, fusing with ordinary biological principles, would have led him to what I believe to be the truth. Let us for a moment turn to its consideration:—
“When I have borne in memory what has tamed
Great Nations, how ennobling thoughts depart
When men change swords for ledgers....”
Should not this be enough to suggest to us the real meaning of the consequence which has followed when men changed swords for ledgers, and which even those who hate war as a vile blasphemy against life must recognise? It is that, as we have seen, when a nation is making its way there is selection of the fittest by the stern arbitrament of war, in which the battle is to the individually strong and fleet and brave and quick-witted. Later, “when men change swords for ledgers,” selection ceases; and that is why nothing fails like success. Yet later still, as France should know, selection by war must take the form of reversed selection, the flower of a nation's youth being immolated on the battle-field, whilst its future is determined by the weak and small and diseased, whom the recruiting sergeant rejects. “You are not good enough to be a soldier,” he says; “stay at home and be a father.” That was what Napoleon did for France.
But to return—for the relations of war to eugenics would really demand a volume—it may be noted that, though rejecting the Lamarckian theory—the theory on which nothing should succeed like success—Mr. Balfour nowhere emphasises the amazing paradox of history that nothing fails like success. If we consider this fact with the idea of natural selection in our minds (not between societies but within them), we cannot fail to perceive that success involves failure because it involves failure of selection, and therefore indiscriminate survival; or indeed, survival of the worst.
Politics and domestics.—It is, perhaps, a noteworthy comment upon what may be called the political state of mind, that even when the idea of natural selection has entered it, the bias is towards associating it with international and not with intra-national or domestic politics. The time will come, however, when the politician—or shall we say the statesman?—realises that it is the domestic policy, it is the internal struggle for survival within a society, that conditions and fore-ordains all international politics. The history of nations is determined not on the battlefield but in the nursery, and the battalions which give lasting victory are battalions of babies. The politics of the future will be domestics.