EVOLUTION OF MAN AND ITS CONTROL 59 



the contrary, shall we hospitably ignore all race distinctions in the 

 interest of the American employer and impose upon our public school 

 system the superhuman task of assimilating to our own standard this 

 polyglot avalanche? An artificial element has here been introduced 

 into group selection, which, as wholly under man's control, deserves 

 careful study. 



Sustentative selection, in the sense in which it depends upon a 

 supply of food and shelter insufficient for the population, has been con- 

 siderably overvalued as an evolutionary factor. Very few species are 

 affected directly by it, as is shown by the rarity of starvation among the 

 lower animals, and in man it has practically disappeared, unless it be 

 in India, Siam or a few savage and barbarous tribes. The advance in 

 the sciences and arts which has so wonderfully extended our supply of 

 wealth has abolished any necessity for sustentative selection in the 

 civilized world, except through the artificial scarcity often maintained 

 by the ability of some individuals to divert to their own use, or even 

 disuse, the possible subsistence of a multitude. 



Even under these conditions, our growing sense of sympathy has 

 tempered the severity of the struggle, and among the western nations 

 men do not starve with the conscious consent of the community. Never- 

 theless, in spite of charity and the poorhouse, an indirect sustentative 

 selection is shown clearly enough by the statistical correlation between 

 poverty and the death rate, resulting probably from improper clothing 

 and care, or in the case of infants, from a sort of semi-starvation due to 

 lack of suitable food. Mortality among the poorer school-children re- 

 sults quite as often from lack of rubbers or medical attendance as from 

 literal under-feeding, and the deaths from tuberculosis and drunken- 

 ness, so often the result of poverty, are not put down under the head of 

 starvation. 



Spencer, among others, has urged that charity be abandoned, in 

 order that sustentative selection be again allowed full scope, but, aside 

 from the terrible expense in human suffering that this method would 

 entail, we can not afford thus to imperil social progress by allowing 

 poverty to work its havoc unchecked. The moral and physical diseases 

 originating in the submerged classes do not stop at the boundaries of the 

 slums, and may corrupt both the fit and the unfit in their progress. 



In deciding as to the eleemosynary projects, however, it is desirable 

 that legislators and philanthropists should give the preference, other 

 things being equal, to those institutions which save people with good 

 inheritable qualities, running all others, as far as possible, on a celibate 

 basis. The hospice for the goitrous in Aosta described by President 

 Jordan, in which cretin mates with cretin, is a horrible perversion of 

 charity to the service of degeneration. 



Though civilization demands that lethal selection be reduced as far 



