lo THE FAMILY AND THE NATION 



which they were brought forth. Individual and national 

 destruction and replacement still form a potent factor in 

 the physical and mental evolution of the race. Yet 

 our modern tenderness shrinks more and more from 

 the sight of individual suffering. It urges forward all 

 agencies for the amelioration of the lot of the weak 

 who have failed in the struggle, whether individual or 

 national, and would fain uphold those that in more 

 callous ages would have gone under. 



Of late years, the means of keeping alive the falling 

 and fallen have grown with ever-increasing speed. Each 

 advance in medical skill, in knowledge of pathology or 

 hygiene, each new moral effort to cope with external 

 evil, results in prolonged life for the members of weak 

 and unsound stock, and still more significant, a lessened 

 mortality among their children. It is not that the 

 pressure of life gets less, but that the consequences of 

 that pressure are prevented from producing effects that 

 are of selection value. 



There is often an inclination to deprecate the struggle 

 for life, an endeavour to minimize its effects, to mourn 

 with the loser rather than to rejoice with the winner. 

 But, against the severity and hardship of the life- 

 struggle, must be set the excitement of the battle, the 

 energy and resource it calls forth, the triumph of success, 

 and, through these inducements to exertion, the perpetual 

 selection and survival of the finer varieties of the race. 



It is well to mark that the danger of lessened 

 natural selection is, in our stage of civilization, 

 accompanied by a new-won appreciation of the issues 

 at stake. The social organism has grown conscious 

 of its own existence and of the agencies which are 



