152 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



can stop him bequeathing certain personal qualities of character and the 

 environment of early life to his children, and they perhaps, in a less marked 

 degree, to his grandchildren, but that extension of his personality which 

 represents the modification of their environment by their control over 

 saved wealth seems to be on another footing. But a man conscious 

 that his sons were ' fitted ' in the best sense, and that they ought to 

 survive, could help their survival both by personal training and also by 

 accumulation of wealth which he bequeaths to them, in either case repre- 

 senting personal self-denial, and in either case representing some quality 

 imposed upon their human environment. Whetham, in ' The Family 

 and the Nation,' says that unless the fittest to survive hand on their 

 qualities to a larger number of descendants than are left by the failures, 

 natural selection cannot act. It is of no use for an organism individually 

 to survive unless it transmits the character which enabled it to do so to 

 a preponderating number in succeeding generations. A struggle for life 

 and the survival of the fittest are meaningless alone ; the qualities of the 

 fittest must survive superabundantly his own fleeting existence if the 

 struggle and the survival are to produce any good effects on the race. 

 The bequest of some investment income to a man undoubtedly enables 

 that man to be freed from some of life's cares, and in that sense to devote 

 himself more closely to his pursuits, and to make him more fitted to 

 survive. The qualities that brought about the original accumulation 

 have had social advantages, and the reflection of those qualities is in their 

 tangible objective results plus the subjective capacity for continuation of 

 them. Whether qualities are inherited in a great measure or a small, and 

 whether they are important as economic factors, I am not greatly con- 

 cerned, for such inheritance, so far as it is a fact, is unalterable, and I am 

 pursuing this subject more with its bearing upon practical social action 

 in mind. So if biological inheritance is marked and substantial, the 

 argument for transmission of accompanying wealth may be relevant. 

 But if biological inheritance is wayward or unimportant, the bequest 

 argument, however closely knit to such heredity, has certainly no greater 

 force. Suppose that it could be shown that only in one case in ten thousand 

 does the distinctive personality of a parent descend to his son. Then, 

 even if the argument that objective extensions of that j^ersonality should 

 not be separated from it were fully valid, it could only apply to one case 

 in ten thousand. Moreover, even if the biological descent were effective 

 one hundred per cent., the doctrine does nothing to support freedom of 

 bequest or primogeniture or the British ideas at all. If the argument is 

 valid at all, since every child would share its parents' personality, every 

 child should share the parents' wealth, and the doctrine leads towards 

 family diffusion of fortunes on the Continental princiiale of 'legitime,' and 

 would discontinue all bequest out of the direct blood descent, to collaterals, 

 &c. Besides, even in the direct line any force the argument possesses 

 is greatly weakened. If a man can claim on biological grounds his inherit- 

 ance of ability from a great-grandparent to be a merely fractional part, 

 qualified and diffused by his inheritance from seven other primary sources, 

 then his right to rank his claim superior to the rest of the community for 

 the inheritance of the whole of the wealth is equally tenuous. Nevertheless, 

 the bioloi^ical argument may have some economic ' point ' so far as the 



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