SELECTION: ORGANIC AND SOCIAL 219 



enthusiast over bacterial selection says : " The 

 higher the infantile mortality which medicine so 

 energetically combats, the surer is the next 

 generation of being purged of all weak and sickly 

 organisms." But he forgets that the infantile 

 maladies also affect th e intrinsically strong and 

 'capable, and oft en weaken them, on e might say , 

 " quite gratuitously! 



(3) Many of the microbes which thin our ranks 

 are very indiscriminate: they remove th e wrong 

 people. Prof. Berry Haycraft, in his " Darwinism 

 and Race Progress," points out that the hygienists, 

 in warring against microbes, are eliminating the 

 eliminators who have made our race what it is. 

 This is a very doubtful thesis; but, even if it 

 were true, it is open to us, as the author of 

 course recognises, to put other modes of selection 

 into operation. Can man not selec t better than 

 bacteria ? 



Social Surgery. — A second suggestion, which 

 goes a step further than the first, is that we should 

 take more thought for the morrow by dehberately 

 pruning our stock of its diseased buds, especially 

 of those who, if they survive, will be miserable 

 themselves and a cause of misery to others. 



Nietsche had the courage to say what many feel, 

 that it would be a kindness to suppress a good many 

 of us. There is no doubt about that, but would 

 it be a permissible kindness ? Who is sufficient 

 for these things ? It is one thing to discourage 

 in every feasible way — compatible with rational 

 social sentiment — the breeding of weaklings by 

 weaUings ; it is another thing to look a fellow 

 creature in the eyes and say, " You must die." 

 Remove weaklings, forsooth ! read over the roll of 



