BIOLOGICAL AND TRADITIONAL FITNESS 433 



keep pace one with another ; and we often see an artificial develop- 

 ment of traditional progress under conditions which are unfitted 

 to it. This would be the case, for instance, in a State which, 

 while encouraging the development of industry and agriculture 

 and commerce by means of a system of economic protection, 

 should neglect the eugenic development of its inhabitants ; and 

 these latter, showing no increase in population and great increase 

 in physical and moral disease — which latter is likewise a symptom 

 of organic degeneracy — ^will, at the first opportunity, fall victims 

 to neighbouring States with greater fertihty, where the operation 

 of natural selection in eliminating the socially unfit is more active. 



Thus we may safely lay down as an axiom of sociology that 

 those States whose social and political evolution does not tend, 

 or tends insufficiently, in the direction of combined biological 

 and traditional progress, will be vanquished in the struggle for 

 power with other States having a pohty more in harmony with 

 the laws of biological and social evolution. For it is not 

 sufficient that a nation be biologically superior if its traditional 

 progress be insufficient, or vice versa. There is absolutely no 

 reason to suppose that the French nation was organically inferior 

 to the German nation in 1870 ; but it was unquestionably inferior 

 ia its social organisation, which means, translated into our 

 terms, that its traditional progress was inferior. And, to take 

 the opposite case, it is certain that the Athenians were tradition- 

 ally superior to the Macedonians, and yet they succumbed at 

 Agospotamos owing to their biological deterioration. And, 

 finally, to take a third case, the Byzantine Empire was annihilated 

 by the capture of Constantinople, because the Turks were, at 

 that period at any rate, both biologically and traditionally 

 superior to the motley crowd of their hybrid antagonists. 



Those States which tend to develop in a direction directly 

 contrary to this law of correlated biological and social evolution 

 wiU be vanquished in the struggle for power with other States ; 

 and the same wiU be true of those whose evolution, although in 



28 



