1908] on Biology and History. 53 



breeder of racehorses or plants would obtain if he went to work on 

 similar lines ; the race degenerates rapidly, and if it be an imperial 

 race its empire comes crashing down about its ears. All empires 

 and civilisations hitherto have involved the risk of partial or complete 

 arrest or reversal of the process of natural selection ; and. in the 

 cases where their doom has been irretrievable, it is the racial degenera- 

 tion so produced that has been its cause. 



When a race is making its early way by force, as by incessant 

 war, selection is stringent. The weak, cowardly, diseased, stupid, are 

 ruthlessly expunged from generation to generation. As civilisation 

 advances, a higher ethical level is reached — all true civiHsation tend- 

 ing to abrogate and ameliorate the struggle for existence. The 

 diseased and weakly and feeble-minded are no longer left to pay the 

 penalty sternly exacted by Nature for unfitness : they are allowed 

 to survive, which is well ; and to mul iply, which is ill. A successful 

 race can apparently afford to permit this, as a race that is fighting 

 for its existence cannot. But in reality no race can afford this abso- 

 lutely fatal process ; especially when unchallenged success comes, and 

 even interferes with the natural process of selection to the extent of 

 not merely abrogating, but actually reversing it, so that it may be 

 more advantageous — more fit — to be a coward, or an idler, or diseased, 

 or feeble-minded, than the reverse. 



The fittest survive in any case ; but fitness is not goodness. It 

 may be, but it may be badness. Fitness is merely the capacity to fit — 

 to fit the environment. That society in which it is fittest to be best is 

 safe ; that society in which it is equally fit to be good, bad, or indif- 

 ferent is doomed ; that society in which it is fittest to be worst is already 

 damned. A nation will ascend, under the influence of selection which 

 is such that the fittest selected are also the best ; a nation will degene- 

 rate, under the influence of selection which is such that the fittest 

 selected are also the worst. A nation will even degenerate if selection 

 be merely abrogated, and universal survival or indiscriminate survival 

 be substituted for any process of selection at all. 



If a nation can ascend in any sure way (its surety being 

 dependent upon the fact that the ascent is in the very blood of the 

 people) only when natural selection actively operates in the choice of 

 the best for survival and parentage, then we begin to realise why it 

 is that in the whole course of history hitherto this sure ascent has 

 scarcely been realised. Babylon may have lasted for 4000 years, as 

 the historians tell us, yet at last it fell. If selection had been 

 operating in Babylon throughout that time, choosing only the best, the 

 noblest and the wisest, conferring upon them, and npon them alone, 

 the supreme privilege and duty of parentage, could Babylon have 

 fallen ? 



Hence the explanation of the truth expressed by Gibbon, " All 

 that is human must retrograde if it do not advance." Why should 

 this be so ? Why should it not be possible merely to maintain a 



