If human pity had dominated the council at the creation of the world, the result would have been infinite injury, because none of the higher orders of animals, even man himself, could have been developed. In short, there would have been no intelligent beings on earth.
During periods of peace, a large number of persons, moved by pity for the indigent, the halt, the lame, the blind, extend to them the alleviating hand of charity. Philanthropy finds favor in the public eye, and charity becomes a cheap and easy means of courting public opinion. The philanthropist with means for gratifying his passion of pity, or the ambitious aspirant for public favor with cash to invest in public opinion, finds himself soon surrounded with a multitude of itchy-palmy hands to help him spend his money to buy what he is after, and at the same time obtain profit for themselves. Consequently, objects of charity become opportunities to be prized and made the most of. Charity organizations are supported both by well-meaning sympathetic persons and by publicity-purchasing persons and their press-agents.
Many an ambitious politician or social climber finds it profitable to become a patron of some supposedly deserving charity. Recently, some one inquired into the methods of a New York charity organization, and found that the sum paid in salaries to the various officers of the society was more than twice the amount actually expended in charity. But those who donated the money got what they paid for; the hangers-on of the society got what they wanted, and thereby lessened the actual harm that the money would have done had it all reached its supposed objects.
While a limited amount of well-directed charitable effort may be for the general good, still by far the larger part of promiscuous charity does harm. Broadly speaking, charity of all kinds is wrong in principle, because the misfortunes of the unfit are a part of natural processes for their elimination, and anything done by charity to defeat the decrees of Nature is wrong.
These are some of the responsibilities for which we friends of peace must stand, if we succeed in preventing war by preparedness against war.
Those who are advocating the abolition of armaments, and are thereby fostering war, have not this responsibility; for, if they are successful in what they are teaching and doing, the pretty constant warfare that will prevail among the great nations during the next century will cure much of the hypersentimentalism that finds expression in large degenerative charities; and these charities will be swept away under the tread of marching armies. Whereas, if we succeed, by our advocacy, in securing adequate armaments, and thereby maintain enduring peace, then nothing can prevent our great promiscuous charities from continuing to secure the survival of the unfit with the continuous pollution of the blood-stream of the race from their degenerate blood through intermarriage with normal persons.
The arrestation of the self-purifying processes of Nature which are intended to clarify the blood of the race, by breeding the unfit and turning them back upon the race, is like turning the sewage of a city into its water supply.
If all incompetents—the hopelessly diseased and degenerate—were to be exterminated, it would be a very good thing for the race. Such methods have actually been practised in the past. At one time, when ancient Babylon was besieged, all the aged and diseased were murdered; and in ancient Greece, deformed or diseased children were killed at birth. But the trouble with this method is that no men possessing the human qualities rendering them worthy of survival could be found among us to do the wholesale executions. The mere possession of the inhuman qualities necessary to carry out the wholesale slaughter would elect the executioners themselves for slaughter. Man cannot be pitiless, like Nature, without himself becoming unworthy of pity, and, consequently, unworthy of survival.
Human survival must be co-operative. Human reproduction depends somewhat on lovability. According to the law of natural selection, a lovable person is selected rather than an unlovable person. Neither sex is so apt to fall in love and mate with a person of the other sex who is pitiless, as with one possessing pity and sympathy. Pity and sympathy, just like the love of parenthood, are bonds of the family. A community—a nation—is only a larger family.
Charity and sympathy make men gregarious. A world without charity or sympathy would be most unattractive. Human companionship in its higher values would not exist.