Ireland: Democracy and Heredity 



341 



Those who assume the task of recon- 

 ciling the facts of democratic control 

 with its theory adopt an expedient 

 which places the whole issue beyond the 

 reach of reason. They lay down the 

 rule that democracy must not be 

 judged by its yesterday or by its to- 

 day, but by its tomorrow ; and that so 

 fast as tomorrows become yesterdays 

 even so fast must all adverse evidence 

 be discarded as worthless. Just below 

 the ever-receding horizon of time there 

 lies, almost in siglit of those who ac- 

 cept this rule, the pleasant land where 

 education and dietetics shall have made 

 the majority of mankind into political 

 units from which there can be built up 

 a government of benevolence, right- 

 eousness, and efficiency. 



THE BIOLOGICAL FACTOR IN POLITICS 



My strong dissent from this view of 

 politics rests mainly upon four broad 

 grounds : 



1. That acquired characteristics are 

 not inheritable. 



2. That within the field of man's 

 mental and moral traits there operate 

 immutable laws analogous to those, 

 which are almost universally accepted 

 by biologists, for physical inheritance. 



3. That assortative mating operates 

 unremittingly to depress one end of the 

 moral and intellectual scale and to ele- 

 vate the other. 



4. That the individual and not the 

 mass is the main source of human ad- 

 vancement. 



Now these statements are either true 

 or false. Of the first three biologists 

 alone are competent to express an au- 

 thoritative judgment. In my mouth 

 they are no more than opinions. Sub- 

 ject, however, to what biologists may 

 determine to be their value, it is clear 

 that, if they are true, the whole argu- 

 ment for democratic government falls 

 to the ground, or, more precisely, the 

 argument that efficiency in government 

 arises from, or can be made to depend 

 upon its democratic quality. 



The non-inheritance of acquired 

 traits deals a fatal blow to the com- 



mon belief that education can give the 

 offspring of educated parents a better 

 natural endowment than the offspring 

 of uneducated parents. Our miscon- 

 ception of the function which education 

 performs has, indeed, become embed- 

 ded in the English language, for we em- 

 ploy the word "education" in the sense 

 of training or instruction, whereas its 

 fundamental meaning is "bringing out." 

 This distinction goes to the very root 

 of the matter. Education can bring 

 out that which is in a man ; it cannot 

 put into a man that which is not 

 there. It can impart facts to igno- 

 rance (ad-ducate, if there were such a 

 word) ; but it cannot make a dullard 

 bright or a fool sagacious. It is, of 

 course, highly desirable that each gene- 

 ration should be, as it were, dipped by 

 the schools into the ocean of fact, even 

 though, for most of us, the point of sat- 

 uration is very quickly reached. 



Government, however, does not de- 

 rive its efficiency from a mere knowl- 

 edge of facts, but from their intelligent 

 interpretation ; and the reason why edu- 

 cation cannot have a cumulative effect 

 upon government is that intelligence 

 cannot be taught and that knowledge 

 cannot be inherited. 



Few persons, I imagine, will refuse 

 their assent to the statement that any 

 political system, however perfect its 

 mechanism, must be rendered wholly 

 ineffective if its administration is en- 

 trusted to men of low intelligence. But 

 it is a matter of common observation 

 that intelligence is a quality native to 

 some minds and foreign to others ; that 

 is to say, it is born in the brain and 

 cannot be imparted to it from without. 

 Those who have it possess something 

 which cannot be bestowed or withheld 

 by the authority of a monarch or by 

 the vote of an assembly. Perhaps the 

 most acute observation which has 

 been made about the Germans is that 

 they know everything and understand 

 nothing. 



What is true of intelligence is true 

 also of the other mental qualities; and 

 it is of the utmost importance to the 



