Having rejected so many solutions of his problem, and having ignored the solution which is advanced in this volume, Mr. Balfour is reduced to such desperate resorts as phrases like this: “The point at which the energy of advance is exhausted”—a mere meaningless phrase; and even such an explanation as that through “mere weariness of spirit the community resigns itself to ... stagnation.” One is inclined to throw up one's hands and ask—Do you, then, who deny the Lamarckian theory, suppose that the fresh children come into the world with this “mere weariness of spirit”? Has this been observed in children? Is there anything conceivable that has been less observed in children, in all times and all places? And if that be so, what kind of explanation of decadence is this?
Science and industry.—Lastly, in a series of fine passages, Mr. Balfour offers us some hope in the help of science. Politics, says our ex-Premier, too often means “the barren exchange of one set of tyrants or jobbers, for another”: a Daniel come to judgment. We owe the modern spirit and modern progress, he tells us, neither to politicians nor to political institutions, nor to theologians nor to philosophers, but to science, which, he well says, “is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge; and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation.”
And our cause of hope is “a social force, new in magnitude if not in kind ... the modern alliance between pure science and industry.” To this I answer a thousand times yes, but I must define the kind of industry. It is the culture of the racial life which is the vital industry of any nation, and which Mr. Balfour has not even distantly alluded to. I agree that our hope for the future is to be found in science: that, as has been said already, perchance our acquired or traditional progress in knowledge has now reached the point at which we have sufficient to reveal to us the necessity of racial progress and the means by which that may be effected.
“Science and industry,”—yes, indeed! But the industry is to be the making not of machines but men. The products of progress are not mechanisms but men, and one may now ask, What is the industry whose products can be named in the same breath with the men and women who shall yet be produced by the supreme industry of race-culture?
[CHAPTER XVII]
THE PROMISE OF RACE-CULTURE
“The best is yet to be.”
In its form of what we have called negative eugenics, the practice of our principle would assuredly reduce to an incalculable extent the amount of human defect, mental and physical, which each generation now exhibits. This alone, as has been said, would be far more than sufficient to justify us. A world without hereditary disease of mind and body, and its grave social consequences, would alone warrant the hint of Ruskin that posterity may some day look back upon us with “incredulous disdain.” Yet, assuming that this could be accomplished, as it will be accomplished, what more is to be hoped for? Must race-culture cease merely when it has raised the average of the community by reducing to a minimum the proportion of those who are thus grossly defective in mind or body? Such disease apart, are we to be content, must we be content, with the present level of mediocrity in respect of intelligence and temper and moral sentiment? Can we anticipate a London in which the present ratio of musical comedy to great opera will be reversed, in which the works of Mr. George Meredith will sell in hundreds of thousands, whilst some of our popular novelists will have to find other means of earning a living? Can we make for a critical democracy which no political party can fool, and which will choose its best to govern it? Yet more, can we undertake, now or hereafter, to provide every generation with its own Shakespeare and Beethoven and Tintoretto and Newton? What, in a word, is the promise of positive eugenics? It is to this aspect of the question that Mr. Galton has mainly directed himself. Indeed he was led to formulate the principles and ideals of the new science by his study of hereditary genius some four decades ago. Let us now attempt to answer some of these questions.
The production of genius.—And first as to the production of genius. It is this, perhaps, that has been the main butt of the jesters who pass for philosophers with some of us to-day. It may be said at once that neither Mr. Galton nor any other responsible person has ever asserted that we can produce genius at will. The difficulties in the way of such a project—at present—are almost innumerable. One or two may be cited.