THE DANGERS OF SOCIALISTIC LEGISLATION 471 



mental and physical capacity that it is necessary, if the racial 

 standard is to be maintained, that they should be eliminated or 

 at any rate should not produce children. There are exceptions 

 but it is better that the exceptions should suffer than that the 

 race should fail. Our intellectual and physical characters have 

 been produced by the action of natural selection upon inborn 

 variations. Unfavourable variations have been eliminated. 

 Elimination is necessarily unpleasant to the eliminated and 

 whilst to-day, horrified at the cruelty of the process going 

 on in our midst, we are preventing it by all the means in our 

 power, we are providing nothing to take its place. In the 

 absence of selection, characters must disappear ; inborn mental 

 capacities of every kind are just as much heritable as are arms 

 and legs. Any social legislation, therefore, which interferes 

 with the unpleasant process of the elimination of the unfit must 

 result in the diminution, if not in the disappearance, of those 

 characters which are so eminently necessary in the competition 

 between different nations — a competition that cannot be abolished 

 by anything that a single or even several nations can do. 



