216 MARRIAGE AND HEREDITY 



should be increasing at the rate of 1000 a day is a 

 substantial guarantee that our civilisation cannot rest 

 upon its oars, but must keep advancing. Indirectly 

 the poor man who brings forth children he cannot 

 feed is a public benefactor ; he renders the struggle 

 for life more acute, and by that means stimulates the 

 energies of his race. In throwing his family upon 

 the world in the vague hope that they will somehow 

 be provided for, or without any reflection at all, li« 

 unconsciously obeys the dictates of the Geist der 

 Gattung of Schopenhauer — the Genius of the Species, 

 which is constantly sacrificing the individual to its 

 higher ends. 



Modern philanthropy strives by all the means in 

 its power to defeat the natural laws of progress. This 

 it does by placing the interests of the individual above 

 those of the species. In social life it succours the 

 infirm and the unfit, and encourages them to multiply 

 their kind. In politics it labours to ward off or to 

 mitigate the hardships produced by over-population — 

 to retard, therefore, the great natural crises by which 

 peoples and nations are regenerated. Had philan- 

 thropy of the modern stamp existed as a force in 

 central and southern Asia five or ten thousand years 

 ago, it would probably have exerted itself to prevent 



