THE PAGAN ETHIC 73 



One of the last and greatest of Darwin's con- 

 temporaries in Great Britain was Darwin's relative 

 Sir Francis Galton. In the opening years of the 

 twentieth century Galton, who in 1907 was my pre- 

 decessor in delivering the annual Herbert Spencer 

 Lecture to the University of Oxford, embodied in the 

 lecture for that year 1 a conception which he had 

 communicated shortly before to the Sociological 

 Society in London, for applying Darwinism to the 

 world on a grand scale. It is a conception which 

 will assuredly live long in the history of thought. 



There is nothing in any literature of the world 

 quite like this scheme which Galton propounded 

 for applying the standards of Darwinian efficiency 

 to humanity. In its own particular way it exceeded 

 in boldness even that conception developed in 

 Germany by Clausewitz, Treitschke, Sybel, Von der 

 Goltz, Bernhardi, and their group, for applying the 

 standards of the Prussian military caste to civiliza- 

 tion. Galton's scheme for improving the world 

 formed the counterpart from the point of view of 

 English individualism of that which Treitschke 

 and Bernhardi desired to achieve through the 

 methods of the Prussian military State. For what 

 Galton by his method aimed at, although it was 

 not a type of the State, was nothing less than the 



1 Probability, the Foundation of Eugenics. 



