Gradually, as subordinate classes become self-conscious, innovations are made which aim to check the unbridled despotism of private property; new conflicts thereupon take place and certain innovations survive, which, at first artificial, become natural for the next generations.
As society becomes more definite, reflective, and humane, as it acquires fixed laws and government, it increases the range of artificial selection; it supplants custom by statute, and remodels its inherited institutions.
It is now animated by a new motive, the development of moral character in all the people. With reference to this new motive social selection is either direct or indirect. Direct selection is highly artificial, but it is only negative. It consists in segregating the degenerates to prevent propagation. Society cannot, of course, directly interfere with the marriage choice of normal persons, for that would be to choke the purest expression of personality. But it can isolate the two per cent who will never rise to moral responsibility. This would doubtless increase the wards of the state, but it is needed both for the reason already given and, more especially, to clarify the public mind on the causes of delinquency and dependency. As long as these evils can be charged to heredity the public is blinded to the share that springs from social injustice.
The increase and classification of the custodial population here contemplated is a problem for administrative charity. Possibly the colony system would make that population mutually self-supporting and also remove the current sentimentalism against long isolation of the incurables.
With the ground cleared of the true degenerates, the operations of indirect social selection can be seen. This also is artificial, but in a less mechanical way. It consists in so adjusting the political, industrial, and social environment as to affect personality, either to suppress or develop it. The two instruments are legal rights and education. For example, the tenement-house congestion, with its significant educational environment, is the product of laws of property and taxation which favor owners and speculators instead of tenants, and of private property in rapid transit which puts a tax on exit to the suburbs. It cannot be said of this and other selective factors, such as the profit-making saloon, long hours of work, low pay, irregular employment, that they permit natural selection to operate. They suppress personality, which preëminently is the natural fact in the human being. Social selection is therefore tending to become less and less arbitrary, but is making room for a higher natural selection—a natural selection where not brute force and cunning are the fittest to survive, but where, with freedom, security, and equal opportunity, the human personality will work out its own survival. Man alone of all the animals can rise to the angels, but he alone can fall below the brutes. This is the glory and the penalty of personality. It becomes a unique selective agency whose standard is raised with the advance of civilization. The Australian cannibal, without opium, tobacco, alcohol, or syphilis, may survive with a low morality. The American exposed to these destroyers must be a better man or perish. Personality, thus becoming a keen selective principle, is based not necessarily on overpopulation and competition, but on that self-destruction which comes from vice, disease, and drunkenness. Its degraded offspring will perish or feed the ranks of the hereditary degenerates to be properly segregated and ended.
But with education and opportunity the higher forms of human character will naturally increase and survive. With the independence and education of women sexual selection becomes a refined and powerful agent of progress. With the right to work guaranteed, the tramp and indiscriminate charity have no excuse, and the honest workman becomes secure in the training and survival of his family.
We hear much of scientific charity. There is also a scientific justice. The aim of the former is to educate true character and self-reliance. The aim of the latter is to open the opportunities for the free expression of character. Education and justice are the methods of social selection. By their coöperation is shaped the moral environment where alone can survive that natural yet supernatural product, human personality.