314 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



as in any way replacing biological selection. The one must ac- 

 company the other, and the organisation of society must be such 

 as to allow of the full operation of the law of natural selection 

 among its members. Thus, the test we may apply in judging 

 of the fitness of a given society is this : Is its organisation such 

 as to allow of the operation of the law of selection within that 

 society, and thus to provide for the survival of the fittest alone ? 

 And to this definition may be added the corollary that " fittest " 

 in society life means the fittest not only from the biological, but 

 also from the social, point of view — that is to say, the society 

 which is best adapted to the conditions of existence is that which 

 contains the greatest number of persons with well-developed 

 social instincts and of well-developed biological fitness. 



Is this the case with Western civilisation to-day ? In the 

 first place, it may be remarked that to secure greater biological 

 fitness fari passu with greater social fitness is certainly not the 

 aim of our Western civilisation ; so that, even if it were attained, 

 it would be by accident. As Haycraft remarks : " There is every 

 reason to believe that, on account of improved external condi- 

 tions, and notably of the sanitary advances which result from 

 the efforts of preventive medicine, the race is deteriorating in 

 general constitutional robustness. Those selective agencies 

 which in more primitive times destroyed the sickly, especially 

 during the early years of their life, have in part been removed 

 or modified, with the result that the sickly are preserved, and 

 in larger numbers live through and into the child-bearing period, 

 raising the mean duration of life, but notably increasing the rate 

 of mortality after middle age. These sickly ones leave children 

 behind, who, as a matter of course, transmit their constitution 

 to the race."^ It may be replied that these are platitudes, but 

 they are platitudes which concern the very life of the race. 

 Even if, owing to the peculiar circumstances in which it may be 

 placed, a race which is biologically inferior, which seeks through 

 its social polity to counteract the effects of natural selection, 

 1 Darwinism and Race Progress, p. 90, Sonnenschein, 1900, 



