Control of Heredity: Eugenics 291 



their colonies, were estimated to number more than a quarter of 

 a million at the end of the eighteenth century. Owing to im- 

 ported diseases and to destructive wars among the tribes and 

 with the English there are not fifty thousand of them today, and 

 these are gradually being absorbed into the white race. 



Undoubtedly there has been a great growth of altruism in the 

 modern world; there is a relatively new feeling among men that 

 nothing so becomes a strong nation as the exercise of justice 

 toward weaker ones, and many idealists maintain that every race 

 and every people has the right to live its life in its own way. But 

 however philanthropic they may be in theory, the practice of all 

 nations demonstrates that weaker and inferior peoples are not 

 permitted to stand in the way of dominant ones. When such 

 peoples occupy territory which is desired by more powerful 

 neighbors, they are either exterminated, expelled, exploited or 

 amalgamated with the conquering race. In practice their rights 

 are usually of small concern as compared with the desires of the 

 invaders, and the inaccessible or undesirable parts of the earth, 

 the deserts and mountains and regions of polar ice, become the 

 refuge of the less capable races, just as "the conies, who are but a 

 feeble folk, make their houses in the rocks." This is an illustra- 

 tion of the great law of evolution, the survival of the strong and 

 capable and intelligent, and even though ideal justice be meted 

 out to weaker peoples, dominant races will still dominate and 

 possess the earth. The only recourse which the inferior peoples 

 have, and it is a terrible revenge, is to amalgamate with the super- 

 ior race and thus lower its hereditary qualities. 



From the way in which primitive races have gone down before 

 more cultured ones there is reason to believe that in general the 

 principle of the elimination of the unfit and the survival of the 

 fit has characterized human evolution no less than that of other 

 organisms. Undoubtedly intelligence has played a great part in 

 the evolution of man, as is at once apparent when we consider the 

 infinitely varied experiments by which he has worked his way 



