The dysgenic effects of this class-discrimination are further intensified by other tendencies: (1) The advance of medicine and hygiene has enormously diminished selective mortality in all classes, and improved the chances of weaklings to survive and leave descendants. (2) The advance of philanthropy preserves them, especially in the lower classes, where formerly the mortality was largely selective and a high death-rate both counteracted an excessive birth-rate and increased the value of the survivors. The emotional appeal of ‘baby-saving’ goes so directly to the heart of civilized man that his head never reflects whether the particular baby is worth saving, and whether a baby from a different breed and with a better pedigree would not be better worth having. (3) Modern obstetrics save the lives of thousands of women, whose physique is such that in former times they would inevitably have died in child-birth. The result is that child-birth is becoming more difficult. Also babies brought up on the bottle, which has an irresistible attraction for microbes of all sorts, are apt to be less healthy than those nourished in the more primitive manner.
(4) Lastly, the bastardizing, which used formerly to provide for a considerable infusion of the blood of the upper classes into the lower, has now practically ceased. Since the merry days of King Charles II, very few noble families of royal descent have been added to the peerage.
VII
Our civilization, therefore, carries within it the seeds of its own decay and destruction, and it does not require high prophetic gifts to predict the future of a race which goes the way marked out for it by such perversely suicidal institutions. It cannot improve, but must degenerate, and the only question would seem to be whether the decadence of Man will leave him viable as a biological species. At present it looks very much as though his blind leaders would lead their blinder followers from catastrophe to catastrophe, through imperialist world-wars to class-wars and to race-wars: but even if, by some miraculous rally of human intelligence, these convulsions should be averted, the prospect will not really be improved. The violent destruction of the human race by war will only be more dramatic: it will not be more fatal than its gradual decay as its arts and sciences slowly fossilize, or peter out, in an overwhelming flood of feeble-mindedness.
VIII
This is the one alternative. We shall get to it, if we go on as we are going: but it is not our doom. The alternative is to exercise the danger by an adequate reform of human nature and of human institutions. This again seems attainable in at least two ways.
The first, and more paradoxical, of these would make a direct frontal attack on the palæolithic Yahoo, and try to bring about his moral reformation. The means for this purpose are ready to hand. Christian ethics have been in being, as a moral theory, for nearly two thousand years. If the Yahoo could be really christianized, he would at any rate cease to cut his own throat in cutting his neighbour’s. And it is astonishing how much scientific support is forthcoming for the paradoxes of Christian ethics. It is an historical fact that the meek have a knack of inheriting the earth after their lords and masters have killed each other off, and that passive resistance wears out the greatest violence, and conscientious objection defeats the craftiest opportunism, if only you can get enough of them. It is a biological fact that the rabbit survives better than the tiger; and the same would appear to be true of the human ‘rabbit’ and the Nietzschean ‘wild beast.’ Intrinsically, therefore, Christian ethics might be well worth trying.
I wish I could believe it likely that this policy will be tried. But the palæolithic Yahoo has been dosed with Christian ethics for two thousand years, and they have never either impressed or improved him. Their paradoxes give him a moral shock, and he has not brains enough to grasp their rationality. He will exclaim rather with the gallant admiral in the House of Commons, when justly indignant at the unheard-of notion that a ‘moral gesture’ of a Labour Government might be the best policy, “Good God, sir, if we are to rely for our air security on the Sermon on the Mount, all I can say is, ‘God help us!’” Besides, the proposal to put Christian principles into practice would be bitterly opposed by all the Churches in Christendom.[B]
It may be more prudent, therefore, to try a safer though slower way, that of the eugenical reform and reconstruction of our social organization. As to the possibilities in this direction, I incline to be much more hopeful than either Mr Haldane or Mr Russell. Mr Haldane despises eugenics, because he is looking for the more spectacular advent of the ‘ectogenetic baby,’ to be the Saviour of mankind. But he might not arrive, or be seriously delayed in transmission, or fail to come up to Mr Haldane’s expectations; and, meanwhile, we cannot afford to wait.
Mr Russell distrusts eugenics, because he fears that any eugenical scheme put into practice will be ‘nobbled’ by our present ruling rings, and perverted into an instrument to consolidate their power. He thinks that dissent from dominant beliefs and institutions will be taken as proof of imbecility, and sterilized accordingly,[C] and that the result would merely be to spread over all the world the hopeless uniformity and commonplaceness of the ideals and practice of the American business man, as depicted by Mr Sinclair Lewis.