EVOLUTION , ^67 



experience of those who have climbed such ladders, and 

 some of them are brilliant men, or were brilliant lads at 

 least, I am prepared to maintain that the middle classes 

 (owing to their long period of selection and selective mating) 

 produce relatively to the working classes a vastly greater 

 proportion of ability ; it is not the want of education, it is 

 the want of stock which is at the basis of this difference. 

 A healthy society would have its maximum fertility in 

 this class, and recruit the artizan class from the middle 

 class rather than vice versa. But what do we actually 

 find ? A growing decrease in the birth-rate of the middle 

 classes ; a strong movement for restraint of fertility and 

 limitation of the family, touching only the intellectual 

 classes and the aristocracy of the hand-workers ! Restraint 

 and limitation may be most social if they begin in the 

 first place to check the fertility of the unfit ; but if they 

 start at the wrong end of society they are worse than 

 useless, they are nationally disastrous in their effects. The 

 dearth of ability at a time of crisis is the worst ill that 

 can happen to a people. Sitting quietly at home without 

 external struggle a nation may degenerate and collapse, 

 simply because it has given full play to genetic selection 

 and not bred from its best.^ From the standpoint of the 

 patriot, no less than from that of the evolutionist, differen- 

 tial fertility is momentous ; he must unreservedly condemn 

 all movements for restraint of fertility which do not 

 discriminate between the fertility of the physically and 

 mentally fit and that of the unfit. There is apparent to- 

 day a want of youthful ability in literature, art, science, 

 and politics ; who can affirm that this dearth — not 

 British only, but French and German — has not been 

 emphasised by the reduction in the birth-rate of the abler 

 intellectual classes, which has taken place since the sixties ? 

 Our social instincts have reduced to a minimum the action 

 of autogeneric selection within the community, they must 

 now lead us to consciously provide against the worst effects 



1 The population of France is becoming more and more Celtic because the 

 Bretons are the one element in the population whiclr does not limit the family. 

 Who can affirm that this is for the benefit of France, or that her national 

 character will not change with this predominance ? 



