550 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



tion. The constant increase of suicide — one of the most remark- 

 able of social phenomena — says little in favour of the institutions 

 and spiritual organisation of a society which is thus on the 

 path of disintegration. Far from traditional progress being 

 developed fari passu with organic progress, and vice versa, we 

 are, under the present conditions of social evolution, going 

 steadily along the path which leads eventually to bankruptcy 

 all along the line. As Professor Haycraft has observed : " We 

 may view, and not without inquietude, the probabihty that 

 our statistics, as far as they go, indicate that racial deterioration 

 has already begun as a sequence to that care for the individual 

 which has characterised the efEorts of modern society. The 

 biologist, from quite another group of facts, has independently 

 arrived at conclusions which render this view in the highest 

 degree probable." ^ The statistician, examining the figures given 

 by the Registrar-General concerning the increase of general 

 mortality, and of mortahty from pulmonary tuberculosis in 

 particular, among the " reproductive classes " — an increase 

 which has its counterpart in the diminution of juvenile mortality, 

 and which signifies the mvdtipUcation of the category of weak- 

 lings at the expense of the category of normahty, the better 

 protection of the enfeebled young at the cost of diminished 

 protection for the race, by allowing the enfeebled yoimg to 

 attain maturity and reproduce themselves — the statistician, we 

 say, will come to the same conclusion as the biologist who 

 considers the increase of insanity, of nervous disease, of alco- 

 holism, of general paralysis : the conclusion, namely, that we 

 are on the path of racial degeneracy. And the sociologist, who 

 completes the data of the statistician and the biologist by a 

 consideration of the efEects of the military system on the organic 

 welfare of the race, or of the effects of the general advance in 

 the age of marriage, or of the results of the under-multiplication 



' J. B .Haycraft, Darwinism and Race Progress, p. 68. Swan Sonnen- 

 schein, 1900. 



