52 Dr. C. W. Saleehy [Feb. 14, 



Romans degenerate, all their vast mass of acquired progress and 

 power crushes them into dramatic ruin. Acquired progress will not 

 compensate for racial or inherent decadence. If the race is going 

 dow^i, it will not compensate to add another dependency to your 

 empire ; on the contrary, the bigger the empire, the stronger must 

 be the race ; the bigger the superstructure, the stronger the founda- 

 tions. Acquired progress is real progress, but it is always dependent 

 for its maintenance upon racial or inherent progress— or, at least. 

 upon racial maintenance. 



It is submitted that civilisations and empires have succumbed 

 because they represented only acquired or traditional progress ; and 

 this availed not at all when, for instance, the races that built them 

 up began to degenerate. And, apart from the action of racial 

 poisons, the only explanation of racial degeneration yet considered 

 by the historians is the Lamarckian one of the transmission of ac- 

 quired habits of luxury and idleness from parent to child : an explana- 

 tion which the modern study of heredity empowers us to repudiate. 

 What theory of this alleged degeneration is there to offer in its 

 place ? and especially what theory which explains racial degeneration 

 amongst not the conquered but the conquerors, amongst the successful, 

 the imperial, the cultured, the leisured — the well-catered -for in all 

 respects, bodily and mental ? Whij is it that not enslaved, hut imperial 

 peoples deyenerate ? Why is it that nothing fails liJce success ? 



The true and sufficient answer has been given by no academic 

 historian : but the clue to it was given half a century ago by the 

 greatest historian of all time, Charles Darwin. The reason is that 

 no race or species, vegetable or animal or human, can maintain its 

 organic level, let alone raise it, unless its best be selected for parentage. 



We know that, as individuals, we must struggle or we degenerate. 

 "Work is the law," as Ruskin said, whether for a livelihood or for 

 enjoyment. Living things are the product of the struggle for exist- 

 ence : we are thus evolved stragglers by constitution ; and directly 

 we cease to struggle, we forfeit the possibilities of our birth-right. 

 " Thou, God," said Leonardo, " hast given all good things to man 

 at the price of labour." 



The case is the same with races or nations. Directly the condi- 

 tions become too easy, selection ceases : it is as successful to be incom- 

 petent or lazy or vicious as to be worthy. The hard conditions that 

 kept weeding out the unworthy are now relaxed, and the fine race 

 they made goes back again. There even occurs the phenomenon of 

 reversed selection, when it is positively fitter to be bad than good, 

 covTardly than brave— as when religious persecution murders all who 

 are true'^to themselves, and spares hypocrites and apostates; or when 

 healthy children are killed in factories, or by their mother's work in 

 factories, whilst feeble-minded children or deaf-mutts are carefully 

 tended until maturity and then sent into the world to reproduce their 

 maladies. Under reversed selection such results are obtained as a 



