MORAL EVOLUTION 309 



natural disposition, civilisability as it may be called, is the slow Ciyilisa- 

 product of evolution, due to the constant elimination of all or guiJ^froni 

 many of those who were unfitted for civilised life. The amount the elimin- 

 of such elimination is much greater than would be suspected. the un _ 

 I shall try to give some idea of it, but it must not be expected civilisable 

 that statistics will help us much in a question of this kind. 

 Still they are not entirely wanting. 



In England in 1896 the gallows accounted only for twenty 

 deaths, that is, less than one per 1,000,000 persons living. But 

 the total of homicides was 301, and a number of the guilty persons 

 were, of course, practically eliminated by imprisonment for a 

 long term of years. The suicides of the year were no less than 

 2656, at the rate of 86 per 1,000,000 of the population. Some 

 of these may be put down to the strain and worry of some 

 departments of modern life, some to uncivilisability. Disgrace, 

 owing to the outbreak of some tendency that ought not to exist 

 in a high state of evolution, thieving for instance, may produce 

 a feeling of depression or self-disgust that may account for some 

 of this long and melancholy roll of suicides. These twenty-six 

 hundred were somehow out of place in England, many of them 

 because of moral defects. 



The prison must account for an enormous amount of elimina- 

 tion, if we could only trace its indirect effects. To have been 

 in prison is a frightful stigma, and we cannot but infer that this 

 influences sexual selection. A man who has been in jail 

 is not likely to be an acceptable suitor ; still less is a girl thus 

 disgraced likely to find a husband. How far sexual selection 

 operates towards the evolution of morality it is hard to say, but 

 certainly it is not without influence in that direction. A man of 

 orderly life is preferred, for instance, to a drunkard. How can 

 it be otherwise among the poor who can hardly fail to have seen 

 among the homes of their neighbours something of the misery 

 of drunkenness ? Or how can the rich fail to realise it ? 



It is very hard to estimate the indirect causes at work. Out 

 of the total of deaths in England in 1896 no fewer than 

 19,745 are attributed to " debility, atrophy, inanition." Of 

 this large number nearly the whole were deaths of children 



