196 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY 



to a handful of vigorous Europeans we see the 

 penalty that the " changeless East " is paying for its 

 many centuries of misguided fanaticism and mistaken 

 self-indulgence. What have the vast populations of 

 the East contributed to literature, art, or science, for 

 the past thousand years? Practically nothing. It 

 may be said that these things are not progress, and 

 perhaps they are not — the question cannot be settled 

 by puny mortals who know nothing of the true 

 destinies of the human race or the final goal to which 

 evolution leads. But if we test the social methods 

 of the East and the West by the sum of their contri- 

 bution to human happiness, the balance, we imagine, 

 turns in our favour. And such advantages as peoples 

 of the European stock have won over the rest of the 

 world in all that distinguishes civilisation from bar- 

 barism may fairly be ascribed to monogamy. For 

 this is not only the inspiration of love, and conse- 

 quently of all the refining arts, but by the operation 

 of selection and heredity it is the source of cumula- 

 tive knowledge, or rather of cumulative capacity, in 

 the races brought under its influence. The weU-born 

 Turk or Persian, for example, is the son of a mother 

 who is wholly destitute of intellectual culture, and 

 who passes her time lounging in the bath and gossip- 



