§3 



Natural selection is at work as powerfully now as it was in the very 

 dawn of life. Thus, in the late great war between two of the most 

 advanced nations of Europe, it was the moral and intellectual 

 qualities of the conquerors, as much as superiority in strength and 

 courage, that gave them the victory. Want of honesty, want of 

 intelligent preparation, want of skill, of prudence, of foresight, in 

 the commanders, more than want of valour in the men, lay at the 

 root of the defeat of the conquered. 



Not alone on the battle-field does natural selection work. In 

 the city, in the workshop, in the counting-house, it does its work 

 silently but surely. The discovery of alcohol, and of its influence 

 on the brain and nervous system of man, has supplied natural 

 selection with a new element to work with in the improvement of 

 the race. Some savage races are sinking before it, faster than they 

 could have done before the bayonets of their more improved fellow 

 men. Amongst- ourselves, those who, like these savage races, 

 are deficient in the power of controlling their appetites, who be- 

 come victims of dipsomania, are being set aside by natural selection 

 as unfit to be progenitors of the future race. They drop around 

 us like the withered leaves of autumn. True, they are not all 

 removed at an early age : some become fathers and mothers, but 

 natural selection repeats its task with the children. Has it not 

 decreed that the men and women of the future must be sober ? 



Our sedentary occupations, our want of open-air exercise for 

 the young during the period of development, has the effect of di- 

 minishing the size of the chest and lungs; natural selection, by 

 means of phthisis, removes the victims from among us. The res- 

 piratory organs of the coming race must be sound. Natural selec- 

 tion, as Mr. Darwin has so ably shown, is continually at work. 

 Far more potent than human selection, it can act on organs man 

 never sees, whose existence he may not even dream of, and it acts 

 on the organism at all periods, from the development of the germ 

 to the end of life. 



We see that variation exists ; we see there is natural selection. 

 The only other element wanted is time. We know that it is pos- 

 sible that the child may surpass the parent. Natural selection can 



