CIVILIZATION AS A SELECTIVE AGENCY 483 



Alcohol and the other narcotics produce much the same results. On 

 the question as to what extent drunkenness is due to flabby moral fiber, 

 there has been dispute. Archdall Eeid declares 8 that alcohol taken to 

 excess is an " agent of elimination at once selective and very stringent. 

 It weeds out great numbers of individuals of a particular type — those 

 most susceptible to its charm." This authority thinks moral resistance 

 to alcoholic temptation of small consequence ; men, he says, " indulge in 

 it in proportion to their desires." On this point there is naturally much 

 dissent, but there is no need that we enter the controversy. Certain 

 men are swamped by alcohol and other- men left. In so far as the moral 

 factor determines the incidence of this selective force, we have elimina- 

 tion of the anti-social. 



Finally we may note one more agency which works for the increase 

 of social tractability. The various factors we have mentioned so far 

 have been mainly phases of lethal selection ; now we turn for a moment 

 to sexual and reproductive selection. In every generation there are 

 persons who are debarred or abstain from wedlock. Among the men 

 who enter matrimony a certain proportion desert their wives or are 

 divorced. There is, further, a wide-spread practise, rapidly growing in 

 our day, of placing voluntary restraints on child-bearing. 



Now persons who do not mate with the opposite sex, or mated, refuse 

 to have children, are sometimes those whose social sympathies are feeble. 

 The domestic virtues are the social virtues par excellence. We could 

 never breed a race of misogamists, nor are we in any danger of popu- 

 lating the earth with a race of women militant against men. Along 

 with many other results we perhaps have here some elimination of the 

 anti-social. But we do not care to stress this point. The motives which 

 lead to voluntary childlessness are numerous and mixed, and the final 

 influence on the racial inheritance seems most disastrous, since it sub- 

 stantially results in a continuous sterilization of the better stocks. All 

 things considered, this is the gravest difficulty that the eugenists have 

 to face. 



Ill 



The foregoing hasty summary of the more important factors which 

 have conferred survival value on altruism and tractability has, it is 

 hoped, given some appearance of solidity to the contention that there 

 has been a steady elimination of the anti-social throughout historic 

 times. It is not argued that we have here an explanation of all the 

 moral differences between the civilizations of antiquity and of the 

 present. The increments of knowledge, the growth of cohesive social 

 and political institutions and the betterment of economic conditions, 

 have all played a part in knitting the moral fabric of the world of 



s "The Principles of Heredity," p. 195. 



