SCIENTIFIC PHILANTHROPY. 305 



establishes at the same time the foundation and the limit of the rio\ht 



O 



of property, on the one side, and of the right to live on the other. 

 The first is not more absolute than the second, but we can not ignore 

 the one without injuring the other. 



We can not, however, from the fact that the philanthropic duty of 

 assistance may not be unlimited and unconditional, conclude with Mal- 

 thus and the naturalists of his school that the duty does not exist. If 

 such a conclusion were logical, we should have to apply it to all real 

 rights, for there is not one of them that is absolute and without limits ; 

 not the right of property any more than the others. The only legiti- 

 mate conclusion is, that it is necessary to confine assistance within cer- 

 tain boundaries, to restrict it by the consideration of other rights, to 

 submit it to conditions, and consequently to make it the object of a 

 contract, and thus to realize on this point as on all the others the ideal 

 of stipulative justice. The practical limitation of a right is always by 

 another right : the right of property, for example, is limited by the 

 right of circulation, by that of condemning it for public uses, etc., and 

 vice versa and the means of fixing the limit is free parleying between 

 the parties, resulting in a contract. All legislation which neglects to 

 give a form of contract to the laws it promulgates, prepares conflicts 

 of every kind for society, and leaves a germ of war in the law itself. 



But, while true philanthropy, which has to do only with social jus- 

 tice, ought to consider the present and the past, it has also to deal with 

 the f utui-e. It is in this point of view that the theories of Malthus and 

 Darwin gain the advantage ; here moral and juridical considerations 

 are complemented by considerations borrowed from natural history. 

 We have already recognized, with Malthus and Stuart Mill, that we 

 can not put this point aside unless we would produce artificially, in a 

 more or less distant future, an excessive multiplication of the species. 

 It now remains to examine, with Mr. Spencer and Mr. Darwin, another 

 rock in the way of the philanthropist the danger of producing a 

 physical and intellectual deterioration of the species by overlooking 

 the laws of natural selection and heredity. 



Philanthropy, apart from science, sees only the immediate influence 

 of the measures it proposes ; it entirely neglects their influence, infi- 

 nitely more important, on the physical status and the morals of future 

 generations. It forgets that every new measure in legislation or pol- 

 icy tends to produce modifications, for better or worse, in human nat- 

 ure.* These modifications are the inevitable effect of biological laws, 



* Religious fanaticism, for instance, by its measures of persecution, has produced 

 effects which its partisans were far from foreseeing, and a kind of cross-action. " By a 

 course of penalties and poisonings," says Galton, in his " Hereditary Genius," " the Spanish 

 nation has been deprived of free-thinkers and drained, as it were, of a thousand persons 

 a year, during the three centuries between 14 74 and 1784 ; for an average of one hundred 

 persons were executed and an average of nine hundred persons imprisoned every year 

 during that period. During the three centuries, 32,000 persons were burned, 17,000 

 burned in effigy (the most of the persons themselves died in prison, or left Spain), and 

 VOL. xxii. 20 



