202 COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD PART in 



selection," not sanitation, to make our people healthy, 

 we might succumb ! 



It is not to be denied that pestilence is relatively 

 advantageous. If the world must go on under con- 

 ditions of filth, it is better for the race that the resulting 

 diseases should blaze up in intermittent epidemics, carry- 

 ing off the weakest, than that they should linger on as 

 a chronic leaven of weakness and pain, tainting the 

 whole race. But it rests upon us to find a better system 

 than the serviceable pestilence. I say again in all 

 seriousness, if we selfishly fell back upon laissez faire, 

 natural selection might eliminate us all. Civilisation 

 may well have softened our fibre in some respects ; and 

 homo sapiens has no title-deeds to life guaranteeing him 

 its continuance. Of all conceptions of the end of the 

 (human) world, none perhaps could be more ghastly 

 than the vision of a race dwindling away, from vice, from 

 self-indulgence, from inherited disease a race that could 

 not rise to the responsibilities of reason and conscience, 

 but called " sauve qui peut " when danger came, with 

 the result that from the ensuing stampede none escaped 

 without fatal injuries. If we fall too low, wise nature 

 will simply stamp out all of us. 



And yet we have in pestilence, while it lasts, an 

 accessory selecting agency (Natural Selection C), with 

 the drawback noted, that the monster leaves the mark 

 of his talons upon many who escape with their lives. 



Vice. Mr. Sutherland lays much stress upon the 

 excellent results due to elimination of the vicious. 

 This is of course Natural Selection B, and nothing more. 

 Prolong to infinity the elimination of vicious persons 

 will that develop virtue? At least it would not, upon 

 any view, improve its quality. Another favourite idea 

 is that any special vice, if left unchecked e.g. drunken- 



