496 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL CHAP. 



the average, leave more descendants than the latter. It 

 is true that the latter not unfrequently marry earlier and 

 have larger families ; but many of these die young, and 

 as, on the average, children resemble their parents, fewer 

 of these will survive and leave offspring. Thus, accidents, 

 violence, and the effects of a reckless and vicious life, are 

 natural checks to the increase of population among these 

 classes, and this inevitably gives an advantage to the more 

 intellectual, the more prudent, and the more moral portion 

 of each race. The latter will, therefore, increase at the 

 expense of the former, and thus again tend to raise the 

 mean level of humanity. 



But society has always, in one way or another, interfered 

 with these beneficent processes, and has thus retarded the 

 general advance. The celibacy of the clergy and the 

 refuge offered by monasteries and nunneries to many to 

 whom the rude struggle of the world was distasteful, 

 and whose gentle natures fitted them for deeds of charity 

 or to excel in literature or art, prevented the increase of 

 these nobler individuals ; and thus, as Mr. Galton well 

 remarks, " the Church, by a policy singularly unwise and 

 suicidal, brutalized the breed of our forefathers." By a 

 still more deplorable policy, independent thought and 

 that true nobility which refuses to purchase life by a 

 lifelong lie, was almost exterminated in Europe by 

 religious persecution. It is calculated that for the three 

 centuries between 1471 and 1781, a thousand persons 

 annually were either executed or imprisoned by the 

 Inquisition in Spain alone. In Italy it was even worse ; 

 while in France during the seventeenth century three or 

 four hundred thousand Protestants perished in prison, at 

 the galleys, or on the scaffold. 



Another cause which has had a prejudicial effect at all 

 times, and which continues in action in the civilized 

 societies of to-day, is the system of inherited wealth, 

 which often gives to the weak and vicious an undue 

 advantage both in the certainty of subsistence without 

 labour, and in the greater opportunity for early marriage 

 and leaving a numerous offspring. We also interfere 

 with the course of nature by preserving the weak, the 



