264 Life awl Letterit of Fntncis Cnffon 



diminished fertility of highly-bred animals, unless he supposed, as in the case 

 of the race-horse, a selection by one character, sjiy, speed, only. There is, 

 I think, no evidence that a selection of man by both |jhysi(|ue and mentality 

 would lead to an infertile race. 



With Galton's statement that a low race, subjected to conditions of life 

 that demand a high level of efficiency, must be submitted to a very rigorous 

 selection involving great pain and misery, we can certainly agree. And we 

 can also do so in the suggestion that the terrible suffering would disappear 

 did we replace it by a higher race. 



"The most merciful form," writes Qalton, "of what I ventured to call 'eugenics' would 

 consist in watching for the indications of superior strains or races, and in ho favouring them 

 that their progeny shall outnumber and gradually replact- that of the old one." (p. 307.) 



The following section of the Inqxiiries is concerned with the Injliience 

 of Man upon Race (pp. 308-17). Galton gives in a very few pages an 

 able ethnographical survey of the world; he shows that in almost every 

 known country there are three or four races or sub-races of man competing 

 consciously or unconsciously for dominance. The process of evolution is still 

 going on around us, and we disregard it instead of studying it and facilitating 

 it. He i-aises a. strong protest against that misleading word "aborigines," 

 and points out that it dates from a time when a false cosmogony thought 

 the world young and life to be of very recent aj^pearance. There are to-day 

 practically no original inhabitants of any district; all hold their lands only by 

 the robber-rights of their ance-stors. It would be difficult indeed to find a 

 country which being unoccupied was colonised by its pre.sent inhabitants, and 

 thence to assert their right of occupation '. Such reasoning carried to its logical 

 conclusion might demand the complete surrender of Australia to the marsupials 

 or even the monotremes. 



"There exists," writes Galton, "a sentiment for the most part quite unreasonable, against 

 the gradual extinction of an inferior race. It rests on some confusion betwec>n the race and the 

 individual, as if the destruction of a race was equivalent to the destruction of a large number 

 of men. It is nothing of the kind where the process of extinction works silently and slowly 

 thn>ugh the earlier marriage of members of the superior race, through their greater vitality 

 under e(|ual stress, through their better ciiances of getting a livelihofxl, or through their pre- 

 potency in mixed marriages. That the members of an inferior clas.s should dislike being elbowed 

 out of the way is another matter; but it may Ije somewhat brutally arguwl that whenever two 

 individuals struggle for a single place, one must yield, and that there will l)e no more unhap- 

 piness <m the whole, if the inferior yield to the superior than conversely, whereas the world 

 will be permanently enriched by the success of the superior'." (p. 309.) 



' The preliminary discussioti of the recent peace terms at Versailles was accompani(M^l by 

 much futile talk about the 'rights' of small nations and of racial units. No small |)eople, 

 because it at present occupies a certain area, can be said to have a 'right' to mineral resources 

 vastly exceeding its own consumption and easential to the needs of a larger adjacent population. 

 Any allotment of landit based solely on 'aboriginal' or even prasent occupational 'rights' is 

 certain to !« called in question by the pressure of race against race. The peace-makers of 

 Versailles lacked the knowledge that springs from a study of evolution. 



' A great deal of the missionary argument in favour of the retc-ntion of the negro in tropical 

 Africa, as against the Indian, or, as (jaltoii proposed, the Chinese immigrant (see our p. 33), 

 ariaesfrom the fact that the negro's emotional nature makes him a more ready convert than the mort^ 

 highly civilised Asiatics. Africa, like Europe of the folk-wandering days, has always l>een the 



