MEDICAL SELECTION. 17% 
diseases for many years. Such ravaging evils as consump- 
tion, scrofula, syphilis, and also many forms of mental dis- 
orders, are transmitted by inheritance to a great extent, 
and transferred by sickly parents to some of their children, 
or even to the whole of their descendants. Now, the longer 
the diseased parents, with medical assistance, can drag on 
their sickly existence, the more numerous are the descend- 
ants who will inherit incurable evils, and the greater will 
be the number of individuals, again, in the succeeding gene- 
ration, thanks to that artificial “medical selection,’ who 
will be infected by their parents with lingering, hereditary 
disease. 
If any one were to venture the proposal, after the ex- 
amples of the Spartans and Redskins, to kill, immediately 
upon their birth, all miserable, crippled children to whom 
with certainty a sickly life could be prophesied, instead of 
keeping them in life injurious to them and to the race, 
our so-called “humane civilization” would utter a cry of 
indignation. But the same “humane civilization” thinks 
it quite as it should be, and accepts without a murmur, that 
at the outbreak of every war (and in the present state of 
civilized life, and in the continual development of standing 
armies, wars must naturally become more frequent) hundreds 
and thousands of the finest men, full of youthful vigour, are 
sacrificed in the hazardous game of battles. The same 
“humane civilization” at present praises the abolition of 
capital punishment as a “ liberal measure!” And yet 
capital punishment for incorrigible and degraded criminals 
is not only just, but also a benefit to the better portion of 
mankind ; the same benefit is done by destroying luxuriant 
weeds, for the prosperity of a well cultivated garden. As 
