time: the refreshing river 



theory originated from Malthus, since Darwin says so himself in his 

 autobiography. We thus have a theory arising from an absurdly 

 easy (as it now seems to us) acceptance of discomfort in human 

 societies, applied with much success to a field where it more properly 

 belonged, that of animals in natural surroundings, and then brought 

 back again with all the resounding prestige which it acquired from its 

 biological success, to justify sociological states of affairs to which 

 it was perfectly inapplicable. In reading Malthus I find nothing more 

 amazing than the mental blindness with which he approached the 

 subject of birth control. "Improper Arts," as he called them, being 

 utterly out of the question, the population must increase more rapidly 

 than the available means of subsistence, and struggle must ensue. If 

 capitalist competition and misery due to under-production could in 

 those days be represented as unavoidable natural laws, there can 

 certainly be no sense in so regarding them in an age when birth- 

 control is rationally considered and when the advance of scientific 

 technology has rendered under-production a thing of the past. It 

 seems quite clear that a control of population by a world-authority 

 subject to no class or race prejudices, is the goal towards which all 

 our efforts should be tending. 



The Mechanisation oj Democracy. 



Reference was made just now to the fallacy that most of the m.ental 

 deficiency in a population arises from the reproduction of mentally 

 deficient people. Allied to the above fallacy is that which alleges that 

 biology requires an aristocratic constitution of society. Each grade of 

 society, it is said, reproduces itself. Criminals produce criminals, 

 public school tie men produce public school tie men, intellectuals 

 produce intellectuals. The children of Plato's guardians become 

 guardians too.^ Whereas the fact is that from the higher many lower 

 are produced, from the lower many higher, and from the great 

 mediocre mass are produced more of the higher than the higher 

 produces itself, and more of the lower than the lower produces itself. 

 A democracy that can produce experts is emphatically the form of 

 society called for by the facts of human biology. 



Hence the biologist and sociologist can not but be interested in 



^ W. R. Inge, the former Dean of St. Paul's, did his best to foster this superstition 

 of course, by publishing his own "family tree" (in Outspoken Essays, II. 260). But 

 even in cases where achievements more valuable to the community than orthodox 

 theological scholarship recur in close successive generations, the point is that this is the 

 rare exception, not the rule. 



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