i6z COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART m 



In anthropology Mr. Sutherland is inclined through- 

 out to emphasise the importance of monogamy, and 

 of the poorest, most imperfect approaches to it never 

 conceding much sway to polygamy, and not attaching 

 importance to those strange phases of social development 

 studied, e.g., in connection with totemism. In other 

 words, Mr. Sutherland like Mr. Herbert Spencer, though 

 in different form holds that there were no very com- 

 plex processes involved in making man so social as he 

 is. It is natural that such views should be advanced 

 by one who puts the centre of moral development in the 

 family, and who believes that all development moral 

 development, infra-moral development, development of 

 morals out of the non-moral is due to natural selection. 

 Mr. Sutherland's views are supported by much evidence 

 as to the character of contemporary savage life. But, 

 if other reports can be trusted, there are features both of 

 the present and of the past which deserve more promi- 

 nence than they receive with Mr. Sutherland. 



In general sociological theory Mr. Sutherland is 

 strikingly loyal to his doctrine of elimination. Human 

 or moral progress is due to elimination, not by means 

 of wholesale massacre, but through the gradual and 

 unnoticed working of natural law. Criminals as a class 

 leave but few children ; necessarily therefore, in a genera- 

 tion or two, criminal stocks die out l or, shall we say, 

 tend to die out ? The vicious and grossly self-indulgent 

 produce or rear few children ; they also die out. Even 

 the coarse and violent tend to kill each other off. 

 "They that take the sword perish with the sword." 



1 What about the Jukes family ? And again, if a criminal popula- 

 tion is generated afresh by society at each stage, have we advanced by 

 the elimination of previous criminals ? 



