1908] on Biology and History. 57 



cuiicrasted with the impermanence of empires, has been the persistence 

 of a race. 



It has been asserted that that race of people decays in which selec- 

 tion ceases or is inverted ; that in the absence of selection of the fittest 

 for life and parentage, no species, vegetable, animal or human, can 

 prosper, much less progress. Now the Jews, the one human race of 

 which we know assuredlv that it has persisted unimpaired, have been 

 the most continuously and stringently selected of any race that can 

 be named. Every measure of persecution and repression, practised 

 against them by the peoples amongst whom they have lived, has 

 directly tended towards the very end which those peoples least desired 

 to compass. Other peoples found themselves prosperous through the 

 efforts of their fathers ; the struggle for existence abated ; it was, so 

 to say, as fit to be unfit as to be fit — with the inevitable result, racial 

 decadence. But this has never been the case of the Jews. They 

 have always had to struggle for life intensely, and their unexampled 

 struggle has been a great source of their unexampled strength. The 

 Jew who was a weakling or a fool had no chance at all ; the weaklings 

 and the fools being weeded out, intensity and strength of mind became 

 the common heritage of this amazing people. 



Secondly, there was everything to favour motherhood. Here reli- 

 gious precept and ethical tradition joined with stern necessity to the 

 same end— the end which always meant a new and strong beginning 

 for the next generation. Even to-day all observers are agreed that 

 infant mortality is at a minimum among the Jews ; their children are 

 superior in height and weight and chest measurement, to Grentile 

 children brought up amidst poverty far less intense in our own great 

 cities— /m a belter material environment, hut a far inferior maternal 

 environment. The Jewish mother is the mother of children innately 

 superior, on the average, since they are the fruit of such long ages of 

 stringent parental selection ; and she makes more of them because she 

 fails to nurse them only in the rarest cases, when she has no choice, 

 and because in every detail her maternal care is incomparably superior 

 to that of her Gentile sister. Given a high standard of motherhood, 

 in a highly selected race, what other result than that we daily witness 

 and envy can we expect ? 



Thirdly, the Jews do not abuse alcohol ; and thus avoid one of the 

 few causes of true racial degeneration, apart from arrest of selection 

 or selection of the worst, for parentage. 



If these principles are vaHd, it is evident that our redemption from 

 the fate of all our predecessors is to be found only in what Mr. Francis 

 Galton calls eugenics— the selection of the best for parentage. The 

 appropriateness of Mr. Galton's relation to this question is unmistake- 

 able. As advocate of the principle of selection, he is the cousin of 

 Charles Darwin, and he is the author of the theory that acquired 

 characters are not transmitted, and therefore that selection alone 



