4 8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



II 



We may now examine a number of the ways in which this form of 

 socialized selection has worked. Here we shall not try to proceed 

 chronologically, or attempt to strike a quantitative balance between this 

 and other selective forces operating within historic times. Yet by a 

 sketchy enumeration of the factors we may, possibly, suggest how strin- 

 gent and unrelenting has been the elimination of the anti-social. 



In the first place, obviously, the state itself is constantly trying to 

 grind out of society its elements of friction. To-day murderers are 

 executed, and lesser criminals separated from their families and im- 

 prisoned; but the penal regulations of the present are charity itself 

 compared with the harsh punishments of the past. For centuries a 

 gallows decorated every cross-roads in Europe, and malefactors, great 

 and petty, were ruthlessly weeded out. Even a hundred years ago in 

 England there were two hundred and twenty-three crimes punishable 

 by death. Throughout the stressful past persons who preferred theft 

 to industry, who scorned constituted authority, who were heedless of 

 the rights and pains of others, were — when caught — swiftly annihilated. 

 Mutilations, shortening life, were so common that the highways were 

 frequently crowded with maimed beggars. Despite tbe chaos of medie- 

 val times life was hazardous for the predatory — at least for the preda- 

 tory poor. 



Again: for many centuries rebellions have been suppressed with 

 bloody finality. Although quickness to rebel, boldness to defy, do not 

 necessarily mark a man as anti-social, yet meekness and a bending to 

 authority, like forbearance, are bound up temperamentally with a 

 kindly disposition and brotherly love. It must be further remembered 

 that the persecutions of the church in all ages have cut off the recalci- 

 trant along with the liberal. Although there has been loss in original- 

 ity, there has been gain in pliancy. Some of the martyrs were more 

 anarchists than saints. Finally, under the head of legally enforced 

 conformity stands the fact that practically all the civilized race has 

 passed, at one time or another, under a regime of slavery or serfdom. 

 Captives have often come to form, after a few generations, the bulk of 

 the population of the conquering nation. The slave is seldom free to 

 propagate, or, frequently, to live, against the will of his master; so that 

 the descendants of slaves and serfs are bred from the most docile and 

 most industrious of the first generations. Slavery as an institution has 

 vanished, but its effects on human reproduction have been far reaching ; 

 for thus man aided directly in his own domestication. 



We next consider those various modes of elimination which may be 

 grouped under the term voluntary withdrawal. Suicide during early 

 life effectually abolishes an anti-social strain. The person who has lost 



