The laws of heredity constitute the most important agency whereby the vital forces, the vigour and soundness of the physical system, are changed for better or worse.—Nathan Allen, M.D., LL.D.
CHAPTER I
THE LAW OF POPULATION
The population question is the real riddle of the Sphinx, to which no political Oedipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication all other riddles sink into insignificance.—Huxley.
No human life can be maintained without food, and no healthy individual life can be maintained without good food in sufficient quantity; therefore, the relation of numbers to the actual food supply—in other words, the Population Question—stands at the threshold of our social inquiries and at the base of all social reform.
At the beginning of last century, Malthus, who knew nothing of evolution, expounded the doctrine that man tends to increase more rapidly than the means of subsistence; that population and food, like two runners of unequal swiftness chained together, advance side by side, but the pace or natural rate of increase of the former is so immensely superior to that of the latter that it is necessarily greatly checked. And the checks are of two kinds. They are either positive—that is, deaths occur from famine, accident, war or disease, and keep down the population so that the means of subsistence are just sufficient to enable the poorer classes barely to exist; or they are preventive—that is, fewer births take place than man is capable of causing.
This doctrine was a fertile germ of thought in the mind of Charles Darwin. He, while conscious to some extent of the process of evolution, was grappling with the great problems of differentiation and genesis of species. How came it that the life which is assumed to develop from low and simple to the highest and most complex forms everywhere exhibited breaks, or sudden changes, in the apparently natural order? Darwin perceived that a key to the enigma lay in the marvellous fecundity of organisms. Each group reproduced its kind in overflowing numbers, and accidental conditions destroyed individuals and groups that failed to secure sufficient food or to protect themselves from enemies. Here were factors of progress, but factors by no means admirable—a murderous slaughter of the weak, a frantic struggle for existence, culminating in violent death or slow starvation, ultimately in extinction. Nevertheless, the medal had two sides, for the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong; bread is the portion of the wise, favour the reward of skill. Should we feel surprise that in a semi-theological and metaphysical era, rather than a scientific one, Darwin formulated his great discovery in terms suggesting not a cruel, but a beneficent Nature? His law of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, established itself in many minds as a sacred principle that man could neither deny nor seek to counteract.
Now this conception, carried into the field of economics, confused the minds of men engaged in the study of facts and problems of human life and progress. Political economists had to contemplate a social strife and struggle for existence among men as fierce and relentless as that holding sway in the brute kingdom. And in this struggle society as a whole stood on the side of external nature as opposed to the mass of striving individuals. A genetic, spontaneously developed system of industry favoured a high birth-rate that kept wages low, an unscrupulous exploitation of labour in the interests of capital, a wholesale slaughter of infants, a crushing out or trampling down of the weak, and a perpetual grinding of the face of the poor, while, simultaneously, wealth was multiplying and capital becoming concentrated and easy of control by the so-called princes of industry. Conditions of life to the great mass of the people were fraught with constant misery; yet, since Darwin had demonstrated—in his Origin of Species, published in 1858—that a struggle for existence eventuates in the survival of the fittest, enlightened thinkers, with a few rare exceptions, accepted the cruel facts of industrial life without any conscious moral revolt from the system.
“Laissez-faire” was the logical outcome of Darwinian law applied to human affairs, and Darwin’s authority dominated the public mind of the period. Christianity was teaching the principle that the poor would be with us always; a poet cheerfully sang “God’s in His Heaven; All’s right with the world; All’s love and all’s law,” and political economists expounded the laws of demand and supply, of rent, of wages, of profits, of interest, etc., without one hint or surmise that man himself was bound to interfere with the action of derivative laws, to modify or even annul them.
Meanwhile an instinct of sympathy, rudimentary in primitive man, was steadily growing and strengthening during all the transitions of tribal, village-communal, feudal and national life, in the stormy militant epoch, till the moment arrived when it compelled man’s interference. Spontaneously, impulsively, individual philanthropy interposed between a suffering humanity on the one hand, and on the other external nature and a social system that were alike relentless. It supported the weak and helped the unfit to survive. It deliberately selected the half-starved, the diseased, the criminals, and enabled them to exist and propagate. Finally it forced society to make laws subversive of the policy of “laissez-faire,” thereby introducing a new order of things, irrespective of all doctrinaire principles or authoritative teaching. That new order of things is socialism, and the genesis of socialism is distinctly to be traced to the vital element in human nature—unselfish sympathy.
The rise and progress of philanthropic action carries momentous issues in various directions, both unfavourable and favourable to human welfare. It has made the law of natural selection and survival of the fittest obsolete for us as applied to man. It tends to a lowering of the level of average health and a gradual degenerating of the race through selection of the unfit, and through the power of hereditary transmission. It counteracts the positive or destructive checks to the increase of population, and thereby extends the area of general misery. Nevertheless, at the same time, it increases the strength and the solidarity of human society, and becomes a new law of life. That law may be called “Sympathetic Selection” and “Survival of the Gentle.” Darwin in 1878 acknowledged its existence. He recognized it as a law in human society superseding that of Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest.