338 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



institutions are a solid advance on the institutions of the ancient 

 regime in France ; it cannot be maintained that, from the point of 

 view of race progress, they are calculated to inspire confidence. 

 Without recapitulating the facts already arrived at in support 

 of this contention, we may at once proceed to remark that the 

 very tendency of our institutions, of our present phase of social 

 evolution, contains an imminent danger for such progress. The 

 humanitarian tendencies of modern times, which are pre- 

 eminently the fruit of democratic teaching, may very possibly 

 lead, and do as a matter of fact lead, to results contrary to those 

 which it was hoped to attain by their means. Their object is 

 to diminish suffering, and, more often than not, they increase 

 J it. Herbert Spencer has most tnily remarked that " fostering 

 N ) the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good is an extreme 

 cruelty. It is a deliberate storing up of miseries for future 

 generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that 

 of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles and 

 idlers and criminals. To aid the bad in midtiplying is, in effect, 

 the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a larger 

 host of enemies. It may be doubted whether the maudlin 

 philanthropy which, looking only at direct mitigations, ignores 

 indirect mischiefs, does not inflict more misery than the ex- 

 tremest selfishness infiicts."^ The tendencies and results of 

 social evolution among Western nations are well summed up by 

 Dr. Haycraft when he writes that " we are rapidly diminishing 

 those selective agencies which in the past have developed race 

 vigour. . . . This increased preservation of the sickly has had 

 the effect of increasing the life-period of an average child. . . . 

 Improved sanitary surroundings, as we have seen, are taken 

 advantage of chiefly by the sickly ; and thus with our in- 

 creased probability of life we have diminished the average 

 robustness of constitution, or innate healthiness, of the 



1 Spencer, The Study of Sociology, 21st edition, p. 340. Williams and 

 Norgate. 



