Eugenics as a Creed and the Last Decade of Galton's Life 219 



physical, intellectual and moral grounds, there must essentially be a least 

 efficient as there will be a most efficient class. If inheritance holds for these 

 characteristics then the relative fertility of these classes is of the utmost 

 national importance. The same is true of the relative fertility of races and 

 nations : 



"The frequency in history with which one race has supplanted another over wide geo- 

 graphical areas is one of the most striking [incidents] in the evolution of mankind. The denizens 

 of the world at the present day form a very different human stock from that which inhabited it 

 a dozen generations ago, and to all appearance a no less difference will be found in our successors 

 a dozen generations hence." (p. 10.) 



Galton notes the Europeans who have swarmed over all the temperate 

 regions of the globe, forming the nuclei of many future nations, the dis- 

 appearance of the American Indian and the appearance of 8,000,000 negroes 

 in America. He might have added many other instances even within Europe 

 itself. It is indeed true that we hardly allow our thoughts to rest on the 

 startling racial changes which have occurred in Europe in the last three or 

 four thousand years, and on the still more significant changes in dominant 

 races all over the world during the last few hundred years. Those who fully 

 realise the marvellous evolution of certain types of humanity at the expense 

 of others will smile — sadly, it may be — and wonder whether it is feasible for 

 any League of Nations, however strong, to fix and maintain national and 

 racial boundaries, unless it shall have first fixed the relative fertility of all 

 the tribes of man and, what is more, internationalised all the world's resources ! 

 As interclass struggle finds its hope of solution only in the socialism which 

 teaches the nationalisation of the materials and means of production, so inter- 

 national struggle can only reach its conclusion by the universalism which 

 demands internationalisation of the world's wealth. In the first case, national 

 eugenics is the only means left to provide any nation with men strong in 

 mind and body ; in the second case, international eugenics is the sole 

 possibility of producing finer races of mankind. The men or group of men 

 who can say to a nation large or small : " This is your frontier and you must 

 keep to it," will be forced ultimately and logically to the point, not only 

 of internationalising the world's wealth and its means of transport, but 

 also of saying : " This is your appropriate fertility and you must keep to it." 

 New modes of transport are rapidly making the world too small for mankind. 

 Any plant or animal that overcrowds its proper region ends by destroying its 

 fellows. The domesticated herd can alone thrive and progress on a limited 

 pasture because the breeder stringently restricts its numbers, and picks from 

 them those best fitted to their environment. Man, if he is to be freed from 

 class struggle and from racial contests — that is to say, if he is to become 

 thoroughly domesticated — can only thrive and progress if he breeds himself ; 

 in other words he must replace the harsh processes of Nature, which in the 

 long run grant survival solely to the physically and mentally strong — to 

 brain and muscle — by the milder practice of eugenics studied from the 

 national and even the international standpoint. In the dimmest of distant 

 futures we may see man fitting man to each region of his earth, and not 



