Social environment and moral progress

SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT

AND

MORAL PROGRESS

Social Environment

and

Moral Progress

BY

Alfred Russel Wallace

O.M., D.C.L.Oxon.
F.R.S., &c.

Author of "The Malay Archipelago," "Darwinism.'

" Man's Place in the Universe," "The World of Life,*

&c. &c.

Cassell and Company, Ltd

London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

1913

% V f* ** " ••*

..V.'.' '-^j I* • ' '-
b£*-v .,.«•

I

First Edition March 1913.
Repainted April and June 1913.

Contents

PART I.— HISTORICAL

CHAPTER PAGB

1. INTRODUCTORY i

2. MORALITY AS BASED UPON CHARACTER . 4 |

3. PERMANENCE OF CHARACTER ... 8

4. PERMANENCE OF HIGH INTELLECT . . 15

5. SPEECH AND WRITING AS PROOFS OF

INTELLIGENCE 28

6. SAVAGES NOT MORALLY INFERIOR TO

CIVILISED RACES 31 1

7. A SELECTIVE AGENCY NEEDED TO IMPROVE

CHARACTER 36

8. ENVIRONMENT DURING THE NINETEENTH

CENTURY 40

9. INSANITARY DWELLINGS AND LIFE-

DESTROYING TRADES . . . . 47

10. ADULTERATION, BRIBERY, AND GAMBLING . 55

vi Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

11. OUR ADMINISTRATION OF "JUSTICE" is

IMMORAL . . . ... 62

12. INDICATIONS OF INCREASING MORAL

DEGRADATION 67

PART II.— THEORETICAL

13. NATURAL SELECTION AMONG ANIMALS . 75

14. SELECTION AS MODIFIED BY MIND . . 93

15. THE LAWS OF HEREDITY AND ENVIRON

MENT 103

1 6. MORAL PROGRESS THROUGH A NEW FORM

OF SELECTION 125

17. How TO INITIATE AN ERA OF MORAL

PROGRESS . . . ./ . .150

INDEX 159

Social Environment

and

Moral Progress

PART I.-HISTORIGAL

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

BEFORE entering on the question of the
relation of morality to our existing social
environment, it will be advisable to inquire
what we mean by moral progress, and
what evidence there is that any such pro
gress has occurred in recent times, or even
within the period of well-established history.
By morals we mean right conduct, not
only in our immediate social relations, but
also in our dealings with our fellow citizens
and with the whole human race. It is
based upon the possession of clear ideals
as to what actions are right and what are
wrong and the determination of our con
duct by a constant reference to those
ideals.

The belief was once prevalent, and is
B i

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

still held by many persons, that a know
ledge of right and wrong is inherent or
instinctive in everyone, and that the im
moral person may be justly punished for
such wrongdoing as he commits. But
that this cannot be wholly, if at all, true
is shown by the fact that in different
societies and at different periods the stan
dard of right and wrong changes consider
ably. That which at one time and place
is held to be right and proper is, at another
time or place, considered to be not only
wrong, but one of the greatest of crimes.
The most striking example of this change
of opinion is that as to slavery, which was
held -to be quite justifiable by the most
highly civilised people of antiquity, and
hardly less so by ourselves within the
memory of persons still living. The owners
of sugar estates in Jamaica cultivated by
slaves were not stigmatised as immoral by
their relatives in England or by the public
at large ; and it was the horror excited
by the slave-trade in Africa, and in the
" middle passage " on the slave ships,
rather than by the slavery itself, that
so excited public opinion as to lead to
the abolition first of the one and then of
the other.

i] Introductory

We are obliged to conclude, therefore,
that what is commonly termed morality
is not wholly due to any inherent percep
tion of what is right or wrong conduct,
but that it is to some extent and often
very largely a matter of convention, vary
ing at different times and places in accord
ance with the degree and kind of social
development which has been attained often
under different and even divergent condi
tions of existence. The actual morality of
a community is largely a product of the
environment, but it is local and temporary,
not permanently affecting the character.

To bring together the evidence in sup
port of this view, to distinguish between
what is permanent and inherited and
what is superficial and not inherited, and
to trace out some of the consequences as
regards what we term " morality " is
the purpose of the present volume.

CHAPTER II

MORALITY AS BASED UPON CHARACTER

THOUGH much of what we term morality
has no absolute sanction in human nature,
yet it is to some extent, and perhaps very
largely, based upon it. It will be well,
therefore, to consider briefly the nature
and probable origin of what we term
" character " — in individuals, in societies,
and especially in those more ancient and
more fundamental divisions of mankind
which we term " races."

Character may be defined as the aggre
gate of mental faculties and emotions
which constitute personal or national indi
viduality. It is very strongly hereditary,
yet it is probably subject to more inherent
variation than is the form and structure
of the body. The combinations of its con
stituent elements are so numerous as, in
common language, to be termed infinite ;
and this gives to each person a very dis
tinct individuality, as manifested in speech,
in emotional expression, and in action.

4

Morality Based upon Character

The mental faculties which go to form
the " character " of each man or woman
are very numerous, a large proportion of
them being such as are required for the
preservation of the individual and of the
race, while others are pre-eminently social
or ethical. These latter, which impel us
to truth, to justice, and to benevolence,
when in due proportion to all the other
mental faculties, go to form what we dis
tinguish as a good or moral character, and
will in most cases result in actions which
meet with the general approval of that
section of society in which we live ; and
this approval reacts upon the character
so that it often appears to be better than
it really is.

So great is the effect of this approval
of our fellows that it sometimes leads to
behaviour quite different from what it
would be if this approval were absent.
This is especially the case when the
approval leads to wealth or positions
of dignity or advantage. Occasionally, in
cases of this kind the individual cannot
resist his natural impulses, and then acts
so as to show his underlying real character.
We term such persons hypocrites for
making us believe that they were inher-

5

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

ently good, instead of being so in appear
ance only when the good action was
profitable to them. Hence in a highly
complex state of civilisation it becomes
exceedingly difficult correctly to appraise
characters as moral or immoral, good or bad ;
while there is no such difficulty as regards
the intellectual and emotional aspects of
character, which are less influenced by the
general environment, and which there is
less temptation to conceal.

All the evidence we possess tends to
show that although the actions of most
individuals are to a considerable extent
determined by their social environment,
that does not imply any alteration in their
character. Everyone's experience of life,
and especially the example of his friends
and associates, leads him to repress his
passions, regulate his emotions, and in
general to use his judgment before acting,
so as to secure the esteem of his fellows
and greater happiness for himself ; and
these restraints, becoming habitual, may
often give the appearance of an actual
change of character till some great tempta
tion or violent passion overcomes the usual
restraint and exhibits the real nature,

which is usually dormant.

6

ii] Morality Based upon Character

Now it is this inherent and unchange
able character itself that tends to be
transmitted to offspring, and this being the
case, there can be no progressive improve
ment in character without some selective
agency tending to such improvement. By
means of a general discussion of the nature
and origin of " Character," I have else
where shown that there is no proof of
any real advance in it during the whole
historical period.* I show later on what
the required selective agency is, and how
it will come into action automatically
when, and not until, our social system is
so reformed as to afford suitable condi
tions. (See Chapter XVI.)

* See Character and Life, edited by P. I,. Parker, pp. 19-31.
(Williams and Norgate; November, 1912.)

CHAPTER III

PERMANENCE OF CHARACTER

I WILL now call attention to a few of the
facts which lead to the conclusion as to
the stationary condition of general cha
racter from the earliest periods of human
history, and presumably from the dawn of
civilisation. In the earliest records which
have come down to us from the past we
find ample indications that general ethical
conceptions, the accepted standard of
morality, and the conduct resulting from
these, were in no degree inferior to those
which prevail to-day, though in some re
spects they differed from ours.

As examples of great moral teachers in
very early times we have Socrates and
Plato, about 400 B.C. ; Confucius and
Buddha, one or two centuries earlier ;
Homer, earlier still ; the great Indian
Epic, the Maha-Bharata, about 1500 B.C.
All these afford indications of intellectual
and moral character quite equal to our
own ; while their lower manifestations, as

8

Permanence of Character

shown by their wars and love of gambling,
were no worse than corresponding im
moralities to-day.

In the beautiful translation by the
late Mr. Romesh Dutt, of such portions of
the Maha-Bharata as are best fitted to
give English readers a proper conception
of the whole work, there is a striking
episode entitled " Woman's Love/' in
which the heroine, a princess, by repeated
petitions and reasonings persuades Yama,
the god of death, to give back her hus
band's spirit to the body. It is described
in the following verses :

" And the sable King was vanquished, and he turned

on her again,
And his words fell on Savitri like the cooling summer

rain :
' Noble woman, speak thy wishes, name thy boon

and purpose high,
What the pious mortal asketh gods in heaven may

not deny ! '

" ' Thou hast,' so Savitri answered, ' granted father's

realm and might,
To his vain and sightless eyeballs hath restored the

blessed light ;
Grant him that the line of monarchs may not all

untimely end,

That his kingdom to Satyavan and Savitri's sons
descend ! '

9

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

' Have thy wishes,' answered Yama ; ' thy good

lord shall live again,
He shall live to be a father, and your children, too,

shall reign;
For a woman's troth endureth longer than the

fleeting breath,
And a woman's love abideth higher than the doom

of death.' "

And when at the end of the epic, the
kings and warriors welcome each other in
the spirit world, we find the following
noble conception of the qualities and
actions which give them a place there :

" These and other mighty warriors, in the earthly

battle slain,
By their valour and their virtue walk the bright

ethereal plain !
They have lost their mortal bodies, crossed the

radiant gate of heaven,
For to win celestial mansions unto mortals it is

given !
Let them strive by kindly action, gentle speech,

endurance long,
Brighter life and holier future unto sons of men

belong ! "

Mr. Dutt informs us that he has not
only reproduced, as nearly as possible, the
metre of the original, but has aimed at
giving us a literal translation. No one can
read his beautiful rendering without feel-

10

in] Permanence of Character

ing that the people it describes were our
intellectual and moral equals.

The wonderful collection of hymns
known as the Vedas is a vast system of
religious teaching as pure and lofty as
those of the finest portions of the Hebrew
scriptures. A few examples from the
translation by Sir Monier Monier- Williams
will show that its various writers were
fully our equals in their conceptions of the
universe, and of the Deity, expressed in
the finest poetic language. The following
is a portion of a hymn to " The Investing
Sky " :

" The mighty Varuna, who rules above, looks down
Upon these worlds, his kingdom, as if close at hand.
When men imagine they do aught by stealth, he

knows it.

No one can stand or walk, or softly glide along
Or hide in dark recess, or lurk in secret cell
But Varuna detects him and his movements spies.

This boundless earth is his,
His the vast sky, whose depth no mortal e'er can

fathom.

Both oceans find a place within his body, yet
In the small pool he lies contained ; whoe'er should

flee

Far, far beyond the sky would not escape the grasp
Of Varuna, the king. His messengers descend
ii

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

Countless from his abode — for ever traversing
This world, and scanning with a thousand eyes its

inmates.
Whate'er exists within this earth, and all within the

sky,

Yea, all that is beyond King Varuna perceives.
May thy destroying snares cast sevenfold round the

wicked,
Entangle liars, but the truthful spare, O King."

The following passage from a " Hymn
to Death," shows a perfect confidence in
that persistence of the human personality
after death, which is still a matter of doubt
and discussion to-day :

" To Yama, mighty king, he gifts and homage paid.
He was the first of men that died, the first to brave
Death's rapid rushing stream, the first to point the

road ,

To heaven, and welcome others to that bright

abode.
No power can rob us of the home thus won by

thee.
O king, we come ; the born must die, must tread

the path
That thou hast trod — the path by which each race

of men,

In long succession, and our fathers too, have passed.
Soul of the dead ! depart ; fear not to take the road —
The ancient road — by which thy ancestors have

gone;

Ascend to meet the god — to meet thy happy fathers,
Who dwell in bliss with him.

12

in] Permanence of Character

Return unto thy home, O soul ! Thy sin and shame
Leave thou behind on earth ; assume a shining

form —
Thy ancient shape — refined and from all taint set

free."

In this we find many of the essential
teachings of the most advanced religious
thinkers — the immediate entrance to a
higher life, the recognition of friends, the
persistence of the human form, and the
shining raiment, typical of the loss of
earthly taint.

But besides these special deities, we
find also the recognition of the one supreme
God, as in the following hymn :

" What god shall we adore with sacrifice ?
Him let us praise, the golden child that rose
In the beginning, who was born the Lord —
The one sole lord of all that is — who made
The earth, and formed the sky, who giveth life,
Who giveth strength, whose bidding gods revere,
Whose hiding place is immortality,
Whose shadow, death ; who by his might is king
Of all the breathing, sleeping, waking world —
Who governs men and beasts ; whose majesty
These snowy hills, this ocean with its rivers,
Declare ; of whom these spreading regions form
The arms by which the firmament is strong,
Earth firmly planted, and the highest heavens
Supported, and the clouds that fill the air
13

Environment and Moral Progress

Distributed and measured out ; to whom
Both earth and heaven, established by his will,
Look up with trembling mind ; in whom revealed
The rising sun shines forth above the world."

If we make allowance for the very
limited knowledge of Nature at this early
period, we must admit that the mind
which conceived and expressed in appro
priate language, such ideas as are every
where apparent in these Vedic hymns,
could not have been in any way inferior
to those of the best of our religious teachers
and poets — to our Miltons and our Tenny-
sons.

u

CHAPTER IV

PERMANENCE OF HIGH INTELLECT

ACCOMPANYING this fine literature and
moral teaching in Ancient India was a
civilisation equal to that of early classical
races, in grand temples, forts and palaces,
weapons and implements, jewelry and
exquisite fabrics. Their architecture was
highly decorative and peculiar, and has
continued to quite recent times. Owing
perhaps to the tropical or sub-tropical
climate, with marked wet and dry seasons,
the oldest buildings that have survived,
even as ruins, are less ancient than those
of Greece or Rome — but those correspond
ing in age to the period of our Gothic
cathedrals are immensely numerous, and
show an originality of design, a wealth of
ornament, and a perfection of workman
ship equal to those of any other buildings
in the world.

Two other great civilisations of which
we have authentic records are those of
Egypt and Mesopotamia, both of which

15

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

appear to have been much older than those
of India or Greece. But whereas Egypt
has left us the most continuous series of
tombs, temples, and palaces in the world,
abundant works of art in statues and sculp
tures, together with characteristic reliefs
and wall paintings, showing the whole
public and domestic life of the people,
Mesopotamia is represented only by vast
masses of ruins on the sites of the ancient
cities of Nineveh and Babylon, from which
have been disinterred many fine statues
and reliefs, exhibiting a very distinct style
of art. For more than 2,000 years the
history and remains of this once greatest
of civilisations was absolutely unknown,
except by a few doubtful fac;ts and names
in Greek and Hebrew writings. But during
the latter half of the nineteenth century a
band of explorers and students, such as
Layard and Rawlinson, made known, first
the works of art, and, latterly, an enormous
quantity of small bricks and stone slabs,
thickly covered with a peculiar kind of
writing known as the cuneiform inscrip
tions, which, after an enormous amount
of labour, have at length been translated.
Whole libraries of these brick-books have
been discovered, and as the reading and

16

IV

] Permanence of High Intellect

translating goes on, we obtain a knowledge
of the history, laws, customs, and daily
life of this ancient people almost equal to
that we now possess of the ancient Indians
and Egyptians.

For our present purpose, however,
Egyptian civilisation is the most important,
because it presents us with the most defi
nite proof of the attainment of a high
degree of what is specially scientific attain
ment at the very dawn of historical know
ledge. This is well exhibited by that most
wonderful work of constructive art — the
Great Pyramid of Gizeh — which, though
not quite the earliest, is the largest and
most remarkable of about seventy pyra
mids in various parts of Egypt, and has
been more thoroughly explored and studied,
both as to its proportions, construction
and uses, than any of the others.

This pyramid is known historically to
have been built by the order of King Cheops
(or Khufu), and the date of its design and
erection can be pretty accurately fixed as
about 3700 B.C., or nearly 2,000 years
earlier than that of the civilisation depicted
in the Indian and Greek epics. The internal
structure of this pyramid is its most in
teresting feature, because it shows clearly

c 17

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

that it was designed to be not only the
tomb of the king who built it, but also a
true astronomical observatory during his
life. This has been denied by some modern
historians. In Harmsworth's History of
the World (p. 2034) it is said : " For the
pyramids are nothing but tombs. They
have no astronomical meaning or intention
whatever." And then, after referring to
the ideas of Piazzi Smyth and others as
" vain imaginings," it is added : " There
is nothing marvellous about these great
tombs, except their size and the accuracy
of their building." An almost exactly
similar statement is made in the great
Historian's History of the World, and in
" Chambers' s Encyclopaedia."

If the writers of these histories had
read Mr. R. A. Proctor's book, The Great
Pyramid: Observatory, Tomb and Temple,
they would have known that this state
ment is entirely erroneous. The size,
shape, and angles of the internal pas
sages have been described and measured
by many competent students, among the
most careful and exact of whom was
Piazzi Smyth, then Astronomer Royal of
Scotland. It is true he had many " vain
imaginings," but his measurements were

18

IV

] Permanence of High Intellect

among the most trustworthy. The " pyra
mid religion," which he helped to estab
lish by a series of " coincidences " in the
dimensions of various parts of the pyra
mid with astronomical dimensions, of
which the pyramid builders could have
had no knowledge whatever (such as the
distance of the sun, the precession of the
equinoxes, etc.), was no doubt a "vain
imagining/' but he frankly claimed it as
a divine inspiration. All these are re
jected by Mr. Proctor, who clearly explains
the purpose of the greater part of the
internal structure as only an experienced
practical astronomer could do. I will now
state as briefly as possible what are the
well-established facts, as well as the con
clusions at which Mr. Proctor arrives.

The Great Pyramid and the two smaller
ones near it, forming the pyramids of Gizeh,
are placed on a small rocky plateau near
the apex of the delta of the Nile. The
largest of these is situated so that its
northern face rises from the very edge of
this plateau. The reason of this seems
to have been that the builders wished to
place it as nearly as possible on the 30th
parallel of latitude. It is really about a
mile and a third south of that parallel,

19

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

and it is shown that such an error is a
small one for that early period, and would
matter but very little for the purpose
required. The next feature is that it is
truly oriented ; that is, the four sides run
north and south, east and west. It is
also a true square, the four sides being of
equal length, and the four corners are on
a truly level plane.

The first thing the builders had to do
was to get a true meridian line, and they
could have done this in two ways — by
observations of the sun or of the pole
star, the latter being much the more
accurate, though more laborious and costly.
At the time the pyramid was built the
pole star was Alpha Draconis, which was
farther from the pole than our pole star
and revolved around the true pole in a
circle of 7° 24' in diameter. In order to
observe the direction of this star at its
lowest point, the builders excavated in
the solid rock a tunnel about 4 feet in
diameter, so as to keep this star visible
each day at the lowest point of its circuit.
This tunnel extended 350 feet through the
rock to a point nearly under the centre
of the pyramid, where, by a small vertical
boring, a plumb-line could have been

20

IV

] Permanence of High Intellect

dropped so as to obtain the exact line of
the meridian on the surface, and after
wards on each successive step of the
pyramid as it was built up. While the
building went on the sloping tunnel was
continued backwards to its northern face ;
and a tunnel ascending to the south was
formed of the same size and making the
same angle with the horizon. This had
puzzled all previous explorers of the pyra
mid till Mr. Proctor showed that, by
stopping up the downward passage at the
angle and filling the hollow with water
the pole star could be observed by reflexion
and thus give the exact direction of the
meridian on the upper surface of the
pyramid with extreme accuracy, as it was
built up slowly year by year.

But at a distance of 127 feet a new
feature appears. The ascending tunnel is
changed into what is called the Great
Gallery, which, while continuing exactly
the same floor line as the tunnel, is sud
denly raised to a height of 28 feet, with
a width of 7 feet on the floor and 3^ feet
at the top. Along each side there is a
ledge or seat, 20 inches broad and 21
inches high. The sides do not slope in
wards, but are formed of seven courses of

21

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

stone, each one overlapping the one below
by about 3 inches. The whole of this
gallery, or inclined corridor, is formed of
limestone beautifully smooth, or even
polished. The length of this gallery is
156 feet, and its floor terminated at the
platform of the pyramid, upon the central
line from east to west, when it had reached
two-thirds of its total height. This is on
the level of the King's Chamber ; and it
was probably only after the king was
dead and his body embalmed and placed
in his sarcophagus that the pyramid was
completed, the openings of the passages
carefully closed up, and the whole exterior
covered with a smooth casing of stone,
very small portions of which now remain.
There are two other features of this gallery
which have puzzled the merely antiquarian
explorers. These are square holes cut in
the sloping benches close to the side walls,
and about 5^ feet apart, there being
eighteen on each side exactly opposite
each other. On each side of the gallery,
about half-way up, is a longitudinal groove,
which would serve to carry transverse
screens which could be slid up or down,
and easily wedged in position in order to
mark exactly the central line, like the

22

iv] Permanence of High Intellect

cross hairs in an astronomical telescope.
The holes on the benches would serve
to carry cross seats on which the observer
could be firmly and comfortably seated
while observing a transit of sun, star, or
planet.

Being open to the south, the Great
Gallery would give a magnificent view of
the southern sky, and enable observers to
determine the altitudes and azimuths of
many stars, and of the superior planets
Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The star Alpha
Centauri, which was at that period of the
first magnitude though now much dimi
nished in brightness, would, when crossing
the meridian, have been situated about the
centre of the field of view as seen from
this remarkable feature of the pyramid
which, Mr. Proctor considers, was the finest
transit-instrument ever constructed for
naked-eye observations. Tycho Brahe, with
his celebrated Quadrant at Uranienburg, did
not attain such a degree of accuracy as
did these Eastern astronomers nearly 6,000
years ago. One great superiority of the
subterranean observatory over any open-
air observations that can be made without
telescopes is, that by closing up the end,
except for the small aperture required to

33

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

see the object, the brighter stars could be
well observed in the daytime.

When we remember that the Great
Pyramid covers 13^ acres of ground,
that it is truly square and on a truly
horizontal base, that each side is accu
rately directed to a point of the compass,
that the angle of its slope is such that the
area of each of the four triangular faces
is equal to that of a square whose sides
are equal to the height of the pyramid ;
and, further, that the slope of the long
descending tunnel is precisely such as to
point accurately to the pole star of the
epoch at the lowest part of its circuit
round ~the true pole ; and, lastly, that all
this could only be done, as Accurately as
it has been done,' by the system of sub
terranean tunnels and galleries that actually
exists, while almost all the details of their
construction are shown to be adapted for
astronomical observations of the nature
required, the conclusion becomes irresist
ible that they were designed and used for
such observations, and that by no other
means could the same amount of accuracy
have been attained.

I have given a rather full account of
what the Pyramid builders really did,

24

iv] Permanence of High Intellect

because it forms a very important part of
the argument I am developing as to the
stationary condition of the human intellect
during the historical period.

The great majority of educated persons
hold the opinion that our wonderful dis
coveries and inventions in every depart
ment of art and science prove that we are
really more intellectual and wiser than the
men of past ages — that our mental faculties
have increased in power. But this idea is
totally unfounded. We are the inheritors
of the accumulated knowledge of all the
ages ; and it is quite possible and even
probable, that the earliest steps taken in
the accumulation of this vast mental
treasury required even more thought and
a higher intellectual power than any of
those taken in our own era.

We can perhaps best understand this
by supposing any one of our great men
of science to have been born and educated
in one of the earliest of the civilisations.
If Newton had been born in Egypt in the
era of the Pyramid builders, when there
were no such sciences as mathematics,
perhaps even no decimal notation which
makes arithmetic so easy to us, he could
probably have done nothing more than

25

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

they have actually done. In building up
the sciences each of the early steps was
the work of a genius. But now that there
has been nearly a hundred centuries of
discovery and specialisation by thousands
or even millions of workers, that by means
of writing and of the printing press every
discovery is quickly made known, and
that ever larger and larger numbers devote
their lives to study, the rate of progress
becomes quicker and quicker, till the total
result is amazingly great. But that does
not prove any superiority of the later over
the earlier discoveries. There is, there
fore, no proof of continuously increasing
intellectual power.

But we have now evidence of another
kind, which adds to the force of this
argument.

Quite recently, papyri have been dis
covered which give us information as to
the ideas, the beliefs, and the aspirations
of a period even earlier than that of the
Great Pyramid. The result of the study
of these and other records of early Egypt
is thus stated by Professor Adolf Erman
in The Historian's History of the World:

" But when one considers the ancient resident of
the valley of the Nile as a human being, with desires

26

ivl

Permanence of High Intellect

emotions, and aspirations almost precisely like our
own ; a man struggling to solve the same problems
of practical Socialism that we are struggling for to-day
— then, and then only, can the lessons of ancient
Egyptian history be brought home to us in their true
meaning, and with their true significance. And clearest
of all will that significance be, perhaps, if we con
stantly bear in mind the possibility that the whole
sweep of Egyptian history, during the three or four
thousand years that separated the Pyramid builders
from the contemporaries of Alexander, was a time of
national decay — a dark age, if you will — in Egyptian
history."

That a great historian, from a study
of the ideas and social aspirations of the
earliest known civilisations, should have
arrived at similar views as to the identity
of their mental capacity with our own
as I have deduced from their scientific
attainments, must be held to be a very
strong argument in support of the accuracy
of our independent conclusions.

27

CHAPTER V

SPEECH AND WRITING AS PROOFS OF
INTELLIGENCE

THERE is yet another proof that the
faculties of mankind at a very early epoch
were fully equal to those of our own time.
There is perhaps nothing more difficult
in its nature, more utterly beyond the
mere lower animal, than the faculty of
articulate speech possessed by every race
of mankind. We cannot but believe that
its acquisition was an extremely slow pro
cess, and that it is rendered possible by
special cerebral developments giving the
necessary mental power for its acquire
ment.

How long a process this would be, it
is impossible to say, but it would certainly
have had to reach a high degree of perfec
tion before the equally difficult process of
inventing a mode of writing could have
been brought to such perfection as to
facilitate the further development of the
higher faculties through poetry on the

28

Speech, Writing and Intelligence

one hand and the preservation of facts and
discoveries, as well as trains of reasoning,
on the other.

Now, I wish to call attention to the
very important fact that the origin and
development of speech, and later, of writ
ing, were apparently almost simultaneous,
and certainly quite independent of each
other, in countries not very distant apart.
This is shown by the radical diversity of
the different groups of languages in Europe,
Eastern Asia and North Africa, and the
equal diversity of Egyptian, Assyrian, and
Chinese writing. All other written char
acters are believed to be derived from one
or other of these, and it is known that
the forms and peculiarities of alphabetic
characters have been greatly modified by
the various materials employed, such as
wood and stone slabs, clay, or wax ;
papyrus, paper or parchment ; and whether
engraved, impressed or painted, whether
written with a reed or quill pen, or with
a small brush.

But if intellectual man as a species of
mammal had developed by the preserva
tion of variations of survival-value, we
should expect to find such an important
faculty as speech to have originated in

29

Environment and Moral Progress

one centre and to have spread rapidly
over the world with only slight modifica
tions in isolated communities. The funda
mental diversities we find seem to accord
better with the conception that when, as
a mere animal, his material organism had
reached the required degree of perfection,
there occurred the spiritual influx which
alone enabled him to begin that course
of intellectual and moral development,
and that marvellous power over the forces
of Nature, in which speech and writing,
followed by printing, have been such im
portant factors.

In order for man to develop speech he
mustliave possessed a brain and an in
tellect far above that of the brutes. As
in the more fundamental problem of the
origin of life, it is admitted that organisa
tion is a product of life — not life of
organisation — so we must believe that
speech was a product of a brain and an
intellect sufficient for their development.
But such brain and intellect were not
necessary for the lower animals, which
have reached their highest lines of deve
lopment in the dog, horse, elephant, and
ape without making any definite approach
to the acquirement of such higher faculties.

30

CHAPTER VI

SAVAGES NOT MORALLY INFERIOR TO
CIVILISED RACES

IF the facts and arguments set forth in
the preceding chapters are correct we
should not expect to find any living
examples of the unspiritualised man, since
the assumption is that the whole race
received the influx which started them on
their course of purely human development
within a strictly limited period, perhaps of
a very few generations or even one genera
tion. The ancestral form — the supposed
missing link — would then have become
extinct.

If this were not so we should expect to
find some isolated groups of speechless
man, and of this there is no example ; but,
on the contrary, the very lowest of exist
ing races are found to possess languages
which are often of extreme complexity in
grammatical structure and in no way sug
gestive of the primitive man-animal of
which they are supposed to be surviving

31

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

relics. So long as we got our knowledge
respecting them from the low-class Euro
peans who captured them for slaves or
shot them down as wild beasts, we could
not possibly acquire any real knowledge
of them as human beings. But now that
we have more trustworthy accounts of
them by intelligent travellers or mission
aries, we find ample evidence that when
by kindness and sympathy we penetrate
to their inner nature, we discover that
they possess human qualities of the same
kind as our own. A few examples of
what unprejudiced witnesses say of them
will be very instructive.

Darwin, after attending a meeting be
tween Captain Fitzroy and ' the chief of
a small island near Tahiti to settle a ques
tion of compensation for injury to an
English ship, says : "I cannot sufficiently
express our surprise at the extreme good
sense, the reasoning powers, moderation,
candour, and prompt resolution which
were displayed on all sides.'7

Captain Cook himself, who saw them
in their primitive condition, speaks of the
natives of the Friendly Isles as being
" liberal, brave, open and candid, with
out either suspicion or treachery, cruelty,

32

vi] Savages Not Morally Inferior

or revenge " ; and a century later Admiral
Erskine remarks that " they carry their
habits of cleanliness and decency to a
higher point than the most civilised
nations " ; while all the Polynesian races
are kind and attentive to the sick and
aged, and unlimited hospitality is every
where practised by them.

Even the Australian aborigines, who
are often said to be one of the lowest of
human races, are found to possess many
good qualities by those who know them
best. Mr. Curr, who was for forty years
protector of the aborigines in Victoria,
says :

" Socially, the black is polite, gay, fond of laughter,
and has much bonhomie in his composition. . . .
The natives are very strict in obeying their laws and
customs, even under great temptation. The horror
of marrying a woman within the prohibited degrees
of relationship, the extreme grief they manifest at
the death of children or relatives, and sometimes even
for white men, as illustrated by the native boy who
was the sole companion of the unfortunate Kennedy
when he was murdered, are sufficient to indicate that
they possess affections and a sense of right and wrong
not very different from our own."

The fact that the physical charac
teristics of the Australians are substan
tially those of the Caucasian race in its

D 33

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

lowest types has led me to conclude that
these interesting people may have been
descended from much more civilised re
mote ancestors, and are thus an example
of degradation rather than of survival.*

Many other illustrations of both intelli
gence and morality are met with among
savage races in all parts of the world ; and
these, taken as a whole, show a substantial
identity of human character, both moral
and emotional, with no marked superiority
in any race or country. In intellect, where
the greatest advance is supposed to have
occurred, this may be wholly due to the
cumulative effect of successive acquisi
tions of knowledge handed down from age
to age. Euclid and Archimedes were prob
ably the equals of any of our greatest
mathematicians of to-day, while the archi
tecture of Greece, of India, and of Central
America is little inferior to mediaeval
Gothic. But none of these, though so dif
ferent in style, can be said to prove any
real advance in intellectual power from
that of the builders of the much more

*See my Australia and New Zealand, Chap. V., "The
Australian Aborigines," where this view was first set forth.
(Stanford, 1 893.) For cases of morality among savages see my
Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, pp. 199-201,

34

vi] Savages Not Morally Inferior

ancient temples and pyramids of Egypt.
This latter country, too, in its high material
civilisation and its remarkable religious
system, shows itself the equal of any that
has succeeded it.

35

CHAPTER VII

A SELECTIVE AGENCY NEEDED TO IMPROVE
CHARACTER

THE general result of the facts and argu
ments now set forth in the merest outline
leads us to conclude that there has been
no definite advance of morality from age
to age, and that even the lowest races, at
each period, possessed the same intellec
tual and moral nature as the higher. The
manifestations of this essentially human
nature in habits and conduct were often
very diverse, in accordance with diversi
ties of the social and moral environment.
This is quite in accordance with the now
well-established doctrine that the essential
character of man, intellectual, emotional,
and moral, is inherent in him from birth ;
that it is subject to great variation from
individual to individual ; and that its
manifestations in conduct can be modified
in a very high degree by the influence of
public opinion and systematic teaching.
These latter changes, however, are not

36

Selective Agency and Character

hereditary, and it follows that no definite
advance in morals can occur in any race
unless there is some selective or segregative
agency at work.

As there is a great amount of mis
conception on this subject some explana
tion may be advisable. Many well-edu
cated and intelligent persons seem to think
that whatever characters or faculties are
hereditary are also necessarily cumulative.
They hear that mental as well as physical
characteristics are hereditary ; their own ob
servation tells them that there are musical
families as well as tall families. They
hear that the late Sir Francis Galton wrote
a book on Hereditary Genius, and perhaps
they have read it ; but they do not ob
serve that neither he nor anyone else has
proved that genius of any kind is cumulative,
that is that a man or woman of genius will
have, on the average, some one or more
children with a greater amount of that
special power or faculty than their own.
The very contrary of this is really the
case. The more a person's talent or mental
power is above the average the less chance
there is that any of his or her children
will have still more of that power than he
has. A really great poet, or painter, or

37

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

musician, appears suddenly in a family
of mediocre ability or of no ability at all
in that special direction. A few examples
may be instructive.

Sir William Herschell was the son of a
German musician, and was himself a
musician by profession ; but he became
an astronomical genius, one of the greatest
of his age. His son, Sir John Herschell,
was a very clever man, with advantages
of education and position. He followed
his father as an astronomer, and was a
great mathematician, but is never con
sidered to be equal to his father. Darwin's
most^ eminent son was a mathematician,
not a naturalist.

The reason of this is that heredity
follows the law of " recession to medio
crity.'1 This is, that all groups of living
things vary around an average or mean as
regards each of their characters ; and
those near the average are always numer
ous, while as we approach the extremes
in either direction the numbers become
less and less. Families follow the same
law. If you take a family for three or four
generations, including perhaps some hun
dreds of persons, some will be short, some
tall ; but the majority will be near the

38

vii] Selective Agency and Character

mean, and the tallest of all will be less
likely to have taller descendants than them
selves than those nearer the average. But
the children of the tallest, though generally
shorter than their parents, will still tend
to be above the average height.

When a character is so useful to its
possessor in the struggle for existence
as to be of what is termed " survival
value," then those that vary most above
the average will be preserved or selected
generation after generation as long as the
increase is useful.

It is because the higher intellectual or
moral powers are so rarely of life-preserv
ing value, and are not unfrequently tha
reverse, that they are not cumulative,
though they are hereditary.

With this explanation we will now pro
ceed to examine somewhat closely our
moral position as a nation ; what is the
nature of our social environment; how it
came to be what it is, and what lessons we
may learn from it.

39

CHAPTER VIII

ENVIRONMENT DURING THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY

DURING the eighteenth century our mate
rial civilisation, which had long been
almost stationary, began to advance with
the growth of the physical sciences, but at
first with extreme slowness. The earliest
steps were made by the application of
machinery to some of the domestic arts.
Some refinements were made in the man
ners and customs of our daily life ; but
there were few, if any, indications of per
manent or widespread change, either for
better or worse, in our intellectual or
moral nature.

The nineteenth century, however, saw
the initiation of a great change in the
economic environment due to the rapid
invention of labour-saving machinery ;
which, with the equally rapid application
of steam power, led to an increase of
wealth production such as had never been
known on the earth before. During the

40

Nineteenth-Century Environment

same period new modes of locomotion were
brought into daily use, the facilities for
inter-communication were increased a hun
dred-fold, scientific discoveries opened up
to us new and unthought-of mysteries of
the universe, and the whole earth was
ransacked for its treasures, both vegetable
and mineral, to an extent that surpassed
all that had been accomplished since the
dawn of civilisation.

But this rapid growth of wealth, and
increase of our power over Nature, put
too great a strain upon our crude civilisa
tion and our superficial Christianity, and
it was accompanied by various forms of
social immorality, almost as amazing and
unprecedented. Some of these may be
here briefly referred to.

Our vast textile factory system may
be said to have commenced with the
nineteenth century, and the profits were
at first so large and so dependent on
the supply of labour that the mill-owners
hired children from the workhouses of
the great cities by hundreds and even
thousands. These children, from the age
of five or six upwards, were taken as
apprentices for seven years, and they
really became the slaves of the manufac-

41

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

turers, whose managers made them work
from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m., or sometimes
longer ; and, in order to keep them awake
in the close atmosphere of the factories
it was found necessary to whip them at
frequent intervals. It was not till 1819
that the age of children employed in fac
tories was raised to nine years, while in
1825 the working hours were limited to
seventy-two a week !

From that time onward, during the
whole of the nineteenth century, there
was a continued succession of " Factory
Acts," each aiming at abolishing or ame
liorating the worst results of child labour
— its inhumanity, its cruelty, and its im
morality. These legislative' efforts were
always opposed by the employers, who
usually succeeded in so mutilating them
in Committee of the House of Commons
as to render them almost useless. Mrs.
E. B. Browning's noble verses, The Cry
of the Children, show that after nearly
fifty years of struggle the condition of
the child-workers was still, in a high
degree, cruel, degrading, and therefore
immoral ; while that of the half-timers
who succeeded them was almost as in
jurious.

42

Nineteenth-Century Environment

As the century wore on, other evils of
a similar nature were gradually brought to
light. Children and women were found to
be working underground in coal mines,
under equally vile conditions as regards
health and morality ; and an enormous
loss of life was caused by inadequate ven
tilation, insecure roof-propping, imperfect
winding machinery, and other causes, all
due to want of proper precautions by the
owners of the mines. As a matter of simple
justice, such owners should be held respon
sible to the injured person not only to the
full extent of his wages and for medical
attendance, but should also pay a liberal
compensation for the pain suffered, and for
the extra labour, expense and anxiety to his
family. But all such things are ignored in
the case of poor workers, so that even the
money compensation is reduced to the
smallest amount possible.

It is one of the great defects of our
law that deaths due to preventable causes
in any profit - making business are not
criminal offences. Till they are made so,
it will be impossible to save the hundreds,
or even thousands, of lives now lost owing
to neglect of proper precautions in all
kinds of dangerous or unhealthy trades.

43

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

However costly such precautions may be,
expense should not be considered when
human life is risked ; and the present state
of the law is therefore immoral.

Notwithstanding Acts of Parliament
and numerous Inspectors (whose salaries
should be paid by the mine owners), ex
plosions and other accidents underground
continue to increase, the year 1910 being
a record year, with its 1,775 deaths ; and
even the number in proportion to the
workers employed is the highest for the
last twenty years.

Yet no one is punished, or even held
responsible for these deaths. Surely, this
shows a deplorable absence of moral feeling,
both in the general public stnd in Parlia
ment. The responsibility of Parliament is
really criminal, since it always allows its
legislation to be made ineffective by the
fear of diminishing the employers' profits,
thus deliberately placing money-making
above human life and human well-being.

In the case of mines and quarries,
Parliament is especially responsible, because
the possession of the mineral wealth of our
country by private individuals is itself a
gross usurpation of public rights, and should
have been long ago declared illegal. What-

44

Nineteenth-Century Environment

ever arguments— and they are very strong
—show us that the land itself should
not be private property, are ten times
stronger in the case of the minerals within
its bowels. The value of land increases
with its proper use, but in the case of
minerals, the value is absolutely destroyed.
Surely, it is a crime against posterity to
allow the strictly limited mineral wealth of
our country to be made private property,
and very largely sold to foreigners, solely
to increase the wealth of individuals and
to the absolute impoverishment of ourselves
and our children.*

I will here add one other argument
which goes to the root of the matter by
showing that the alleged owners of mine
rals have not even a legal title to them.
It is, I believe, a maxim of law that public
rights cannot be lost by disuse. Landed
estates were, in our country, created by
the Norman Conqueror to be held subject
to the performance of feudal duties. Deep-
seated minerals were then not known to
exist, and were not (I believe) specifically
included in the original grants. Except,

* I pointed this out forty years ago in an article entitled
Coal a National Trust, which I republished twelve years ago
in my Studies, Scientific and Social (Vol. II., Chap. VIII.).

45

Environment and Moral Progress

therefore, where they have since been made
private property by Act of Parliament,
they still remain public property. I sub
mit, therefore, that they may be both
legally and equitably resumed by the
Government as public property, and worked
for the good of the public and of posterity.
Compensation to the supposed present
owners would be a matter of favour, not
of right.

46

CHAPTER IX

INSANITARY DWELLINGS AND LIFE-
DESTROYING TRADES

THE enormous difference between town and
country dwellers as regards duration of
life and the prevalence of zymotic diseases
has been known statistically since the era
of registration, and a body of Health
Officers have been set up to report upon
the worst cases. The local authorities have
power to compel the owners of unhealthy
dwellings to put them into a sanitary con
dition, or even order them to be entirely
rebuilt. But as many of the members of
Corporations and other Local Boards are
often themselves owners of such property,
or have intimate friends who are so, very
little has been done to remedy the evil.
Again and again, in all parts of the country,
the Health Officers have duly reported, but
their reports have been ignored. In some
cases where the Health Officer has been
too persistent, he has been asked to resign

47

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

or has been discharged. A few general
facts may be here given.

By the last complete Census returns
(1901), there are in England and Wales
7,036,868 tenements, and of these 3,286,526,
or nearly half, have from one to four rooms
only. In London, out of a total of 1,019,646
tenements, 672,030, or considerably more
than half, have from one to four rooms ;
while there are about 150,000 tenements
of only one room, in which are living 313,298
persons, or about two and a quarter persons
in each room on the average. There are,
however, about 20,000 persons living five
in a room, and 20,000 more who have
six, seven, or eight in a room. As most
of these one-roomed tenements are either
the cellars or attics of houses in the most
crowded parts of large towns, where there
is impure air, little light, and scanty water
supply, the condition of those who dwell
in them may be imagined — or rather can
not be imagined, except by those who
have explored them.

Equally inhuman, immoral, and even
criminal, is the neglect of all adequate
measures to check the loss of infant life
through the overwork, poverty, or starva
tion of the mother, together with over-

48

ix] Insanitary Dwellings

crowded and insanitary dwellings. In
the mad race for wealth by capitalists and
employers most of our towns and cities
have been allowed to develop into verit
able death-traps for the poor. This has
been known for the greater part of a
century, yet nothing really effective has
been done, notwithstanding abundant
health legislation — again made useless by
the dread of diminishing the excessive
profits of manufacturers and slum-owners.
One of the Labour newspapers calls our
attention to the following facts for 1911
as to Infant mortality per 1,000 born :

PER I,OOO

Deptford, East Ward (poor) 197
Deptford, West Ward (rich) 68
Bournville Garden Village . 65
St. Mary's Ward, Birming
ham .... 331

Such facts exist all over the kingdom.
They have been talked about and deplored
for the last half -century at least. Who
has murdered the 100,000 children who
die annually before they are one year
old ? Who has robbed the millions that
just survive of all that makes childhood

E 49

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

happy — pure food, fresh air, play, rest,
sleep, and proper nurture and teaching ?
Again we must answer, our Parliament,
which occupies itself with anything rather
than the immediate saving of human life
and abolishing widespread human misery,
the whole of which is remediable. And
all for fear of offending the rich and
powerful by some diminution of their
ever-increasing accumulations of wealth.
No thinking man or woman can believe
that this state of things is absolutely
irremediable ; and the persistent acquies
cence in it while loudly boasting of our
civilisation, of our science, of our national
prosperity, and of our Christianity, is the
proof of a hypocritical lack of national
morality that has never been surpassed
in any former age.

A new set of evils has grown up
in the various so - called " unhealthy
trades " — the lead glaze in the china
manufacture, the steel dust in cutlery
work, and the endless variety of poisonous
liquids and vapours in the numerous
chemical works or processes, by which so
many fortunes have been made. These,
together, are the cause of a large direct
loss of life, and a much larger amount of

50

ix] Insanitary Dwellings

permanent injury, together with a terrible
reduction in the duration of life of all
the workers in such trades. Yet in one
case only — that of phosphorus matches
— has any such injurious process of manu
facture been put an end to. Wealth has
been deliberately preferred to human life
and happiness.*

One of the most deadly of trades
seems to have remained unnoticed till
it has been brought to light by the
new Labour paper, The Daily Citizen,
in a series of articles by Mr. Keighley
Snowden, entitled The Broken Women.
Never was a title better deserved, since
large numbers of girls and young women
are employed at Lye and Cradley Heath,
in what is commonly named the " Hollow
Ware " works. This is the tinning, or
galvanising, as it is usually termed, of
buckets and other domestic utensils, in
which lead is used ; and it produces one
of the most virulent forms of lead-poison
ing. The symptoms are, among other
more painful ones, the loss of hair and
the loosening and ultimate loss of teeth,
culminating either in chronic illness or

* An account of some deadly trades is given in Mr. R. H.
Sherard's book, The White Slaves of England.

5'

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

death, sometimes in a few months or
years. Five years ago there was a
Home Office inquiry, which, after full
examination, reported that the process
used was dangerous to life, that no pre
cautions could render it harmless, and
that it should be totally discontinued.

An order was then issued by the
Home Office that after a time-limit (two
years) the process should be no longer
used ; but that order has not been obeyed
(except by a few employers) to this day.
The deadly nature of this work was
accompanied by miserably low wages, as
shown by the fact that the women workers
have-at length struck to obtain a minimum
of IGS. a week ! Helped by some humane
friends, they have at length succeeded
in obtaining this miserable wage, and
for the present are in a state of com
parative happiness ! How long it will be
before the Government abolishes this
deadly process we cannot tell. The fol
lowing is a brief statement of what these
poor women have to suffer, extracted
from The Daily Citizen of November aoth,
1912 : —

" They had, without power to resist them, suffered
repeated and ruthless reductions of wages. They

52

ix] Insanitary Dwellings

had seen their industry brought down by reckless
competition, and the manufacture of shoddy goods,
to the point at which men could no longer earn enough
to support their families. They had seen their wives
and daughters and boys forced by want at home into
workshops, where, as official inquiry has shown,
health was sucked out of their bodies as though they
had been the victims of vampires. They had seen the
introduction and growth of the sub-contracting ' stint '
system, under which boyhood and girlhood and
motherhood were driven as though they had been
slaves under the lash, and their earnings cut down
to a penny an hour. Meanwhile, they lived in the
hovels and holes of a place which can only be fitly
described as one of the dirtiest ashpits of a civilisation
reckless of dirt where profit is a question."

Those who want to know what horrors
can exist to-day in England should read
Mr. Snowden's series of articles on the
subject. They are restrained in language,
and state the bare facts from careful
personal observation. That such things
should still exist in a country claiming
to be civilised would be incredible, were
there not so many others of a like nature
and almost as bad.

In an almost exhaustive volume on
Diseases of Occupation by Sir Thomas
Oliver, M.D. (1908), there is only a short
reference to the hollowware trade of the
"black country'* near Birmingham. But

53

Environment and Moral Progress

the tin plate industry of South Wales is
more fully described, with the same pitiable
condition of the women workers and the
same terrible results to health and life.
Yet nothing whatever seems to be done
by the manufacturers; and though two
Home Office Inspectors have fully reported
on its horrors from 1888 onwards, no notice
appears to have been taken of them, nor
has there been any Government interfer
ence with conditions of labour which are
a disgrace to civilisation.

54

CHAPTER X

ADULTERATION, BRIBERY, AND GAMBLING

AFTER the terrible national crime of
deadly employments it is almost an anti
climax to enumerate the vast mass of
dishonesty and falsehood that pervades
our commercial system in every depart
ment. Almost every fabric, whether of
cotton, linen, wool, or silk, is so widely
and ingeniously adulterated by the inter
mixture of cheaper materials that the pure
article as supplied to our grandparents
is hardly to be obtained. Of this one
example only must serve. Calicoes have
been successively dressed with such sub
stances as paste and tallow ; then with
the still cheaper china clay and size ; and
in some cases from 50 to. 90 per cent, of
these latter materials have been sold as
calico for exportation to countries in
habited by what we term savages. These
people only found out the deception when
the need for washing or exposure to tropical
rains reduced the material to a flimsy and

55

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

worthless rag, as I have myself witnessed
in some parts of the Malay Archipelago.*

Even worse is the adulteration of
almost every kind of prepared food —
including the showy sweetmeats which
tempt our children — with various che
micals, which are often injurious to
health, and sometimes fatal ; while even
the drugs we take in the endeavour to
cure our various ailments are frequently
so treated as to be useless or even hurt
ful. Along with this form of dishonesty
is what may be termed simple cheating
in the description of goods sold, especially
as to quantity. Threads and fabrics are
generally shorter or narrower than stated,
giving a larger profit when sold in enor
mous quantities in our great retail shops.

Then, again, there is a widespread
system of bribery of servants or other
employees in order to obtain more cus
tomers or to secure contracts ; and though
these are all criminal offences, and a great
host of inspectors and official analysts
are employed to discover and convict the

* These facts are given in the Ninth Edition of the
" Encyclopaedia Britannica." In recent editions the
article Adulteration is limited to food and drugs. In
" Chambers' Encyclopaedia," cotton, linen and woollens
are included among adulterated fabrics.

56

x] Adulteration, Bribery, Gambling

offenders, yet so few people are willing to
take the trouble and lose the time and
money involved in putting the law into
motion, that a very large percentage of
these offences go undiscovered and un
punished.

Yet another and more serious form of
plunder of the public is carried on by
means of Joint Stock Companies, of which
there are now more than 50,000 in England
and Wales. In the year 1911 the number
of new companies was 5,959, while 4,353
ceased to exist, giving an increase of 1,606
in the year. The Limited Liability Act
was passed in 1855, in order that the public
might invest their savings in companies,
and thus share in the profits of our in
dustry and commerce. It was supposed
to be quite proper that anyone should
benefit by the enterprise and industry of
others ; but to do so is essentially im
moral, and has resulted in a vast system
of swindling and terrible losses to the inno
cent investors. The promoters, directors,
secretaries and bankers of these companies
always gain ; those that take up the shares
often lose; and the amount of misery and
absolute ruin of those who fondly hoped to
add to their scanty incomes, and have been

57

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

deluded by the names of well-known public
men among the directors, is incalculable.

Our Stock Exchanges, too, are used
largely for pure gambling which, owing to
its vast extent and being carried on under
business forms, is perhaps more ruinous
than any other. But this form of gambling
goes on unchecked, and is generally accepted
as quite honest business. Yet ordinary bet
ting on races and other forms of direct
gambling are hypocritically condemned as
immoral and criminal.

The vast fabric of our Foreign Trade
in food, or the raw materials of our manu
factures, is also used to support perhaps
the greatest system of gambling the world
has ever seen. The fluctuating prices of
corn or cotton, of coal or mineral oil, of
iron and other metals, in the great mar
kets of the world, are used in two ways
by a large community of gamblers, who
not only do not require the goods they
buy, but who never see nor possess them.
The ordinary speculator who buys when
prices are low, to sell again at a profit,
without himself being able to influence
the rise or fall of price, is a pure gambler
who thinks he can foresee the changes
of the market price in the immediate

58

x] Adulteration, Bribery, Gambling

future. But the great capitalists who,
either singly or by means of what are
called rings or combines, purchase such
vast quantities of the special product as
to create a scarcity in the market, lead
ing to a large rise of price, are ingenious
robbers rather than gamblers, because,
by clever dealings with such a monopoly,
often aided by false rumours widely cir
culated in newspapers owned or bribed
by them, they are able to make enormous
profits at the expense of those who are
obliged to purchase for actual business
purposes or for daily use. This is one
of the methods by which the great mil
lionaires and multi-millionaires of the
world accumulate their wealth, every
penny of which is at the cost of the
consuming public.

This is certainly as immoral as any
of the petty forms of swindling with
marked cards, loaded dice, or the wilful
losing of a race ; yet the possessors of
such wealth are usually held to be clever
business men, whose morality is not ques
tioned.

All these inconsistencies as regards the
moral status of various kinds of gambling
or dishonest speculation arise from our

59

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

inveterate habit of dealing with limited
cases, each judged on its supposed merits
as to consequences, instead of looking to
fundamental principles. Why is gambling
immoral ? Not because it is a game of
chance, entered into for mere amusement,
even when played for small money stakes
which are of no importance to any of the
players. The fundamental wrong arises
whenever it is used for obtaining wealth
or any part of the player's income ; and
the reason is, that whatever one wins,
someone else loses ; while its evil nature,
socially, depends upon the fact that
whoever acquires wealth by such means
contributes nothing useful to the social
organism of which he forms, a part. If it
were taught to every child, and in every
school and college, that it is morally
wrong for anyone to live upon the
combined labour of his fellow-men with
out contributing an approximately equal
amount of useful labour, whether physical
or mental, in return, all kinds of gambling,
as well as many other kinds of useless
occupation, would be seen to be of the
same nature as direct dishonesty or fraud,
and, therefore, would soon come to be
considered disgraceful as well as immoral.

60

x] Adulteration, Bribery, Gambling

We see, then, that the whole commercial
fabric of our country — our immense mills
and factories, our vast exports and im
ports, our home trade, wholesale and
retail, and innumerable transactions in
our Stock Exchanges — is permeated with
various forms of dishonesty, gambling,
and direct robbery of individuals or of
the public. No class is wholly free from
it, and it increases in volume from decade
to decade, just as our boasted commerce
and accumulated wealth increases.

I have here called attention to these
various forms of immoral practices be
cause they are so often ignored. Yet
they are all officially admitted by the
enormous mass of the various Royal
Commissions, Parliamentary and other
Reports, as well as by the hundreds of
" Acts " by which successive Parliaments
have endeavoured to deal with them, but
which have, one and all, proved to be
either wholly or partially ineffective. The
reason of this failure is that in every case
symptoms and isolated results only have
been considered, while the underlying
causes of the whole vast mass of social
corruption have never been sought for, or,
if known, have never influenced legislation.
61

CHAPTER XI

OUR ADMINISTRATION OF " JUSTICE " IS
IMMORAL

WHEN we read about the Turkish or other
Eastern law courts, in which direct bribery
of every official up to the judge himself
is a regular feature, we are horrified, and
are apt to proclaim the fact that our
judges never take bribes. But, practic
ally, it comes to very nearly the same
thing- in England. No single step can be
made for the purpose of getting justice
without paying fees ; while the whole pro
cess of bringing or defending an action-
at-law is so absurdly complex as to be
almost incredible. Jeremy Bentham sati
rised this by supposing a father of a large
family to adopt the same method of set
tling a dispute between two of his sons.
He would not hear either of them himself,
but each must tell his story to a stranger
(a solicitor), who wrote it down and then
instructed another stranger (a barrister)
to explain it to the father (as judge) and

62

Our "Justice" is Immoral

twelve neighbours (the jury). Then the
stranger (barrister) on each side asked
questions of all the family who knew any
thing about it ; and the barristers, who
had only third-hand knowledge of the
facts, tried to make each witness contra
dict himself, or to acknowledge having
done something as bad another time ; till
the jury became quite puzzled, and often
decided as the cleverest of the barristers
told them.

That is really the system of law courts
to this day ; and it is grossly unfair, because
the party who can pay the highest fees
for the services of the most experienced
counsel is most likely, through the law
yer's skill and eloquence, to secure a
verdict in his favour. Yet there is no
effective protest against this unjust and
absurd system, which absolutely denies all
redress of wrongs to the poor man when
oppressed by a rich one. One would
think it self-evident that justice ceases to
be justice when it has to be paid for.
But the system is so time-hallowed, the
profession of a barrister so honoured, and
its rewards so great, that it will never be
abolished till there comes about in our
social system that fundamental change

63

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

which will cut at the very root-cause of
almost all our existing law-suits, im
morality and crime.

In our criminal as well as our civil
law and procedure there is equal injustice.
When the poor man is accused of the
slightest offence and brought before a
magistrate by the police, he is, even
though perfectly honest and respectable,
treated from the very first as if he were
guilty, often refused communication with
his friends ; and, when the accusation is
serious, he is remanded to prison again
and again till evidence has been hunted
up, or even manufactured, against him.
Experience shows that the latter is often
done and a quite innocent man not in
frequently punished. The dictum of the
law, that an Englishman should be held
to be innocent till he is proved to be
guilty, is absolutely reversed, and he is
treated as if he were guilty till, against
overwhelming odds, he is able to prove
himself innocent. There is no possible
excuse for this now, and at the very least
every man who has a home or a per
manent employment should be at once
discharged on his own recognizances.
Equally unjust and barbarous is the

xi] Our "Justice" is Immoral

system of money-fines, often for merely
nominal offences, with the alternative of
imprisonment. To the well-off, or to the
habitual criminal, the fine is a trifle ; but
to the poor man charged with being drunk,
with begging, or with sleeping under a hay
stack, or any such act which is no real
offence, the common punishment of los.
or a week's imprisonment, leaving perhaps
wife and children to starve or be sent to
the workhouse, is really far more immoral
than the alleged offence.

Again, our Poor Law itself, as usually
administered, is utterly immoral. This is
what a competent authority — Mr. Sidney
Webb — says of it :

" Underneath the feet of the whole wage-earning
class is the abyss of the Poor Law. I see before me
a respectable family applying for relief. What do
we do to them ? We, the Government of England,
break up the family. We strip each individual of
what makes life worth living. When the man enters
the workhouse he is stripped of his citizenship —
branded as too infamous to vote for a member of
Parliament. Once in the workhouse, we put him to
toil or to loiter under conditions that are so demoralis
ing that we turn him into a wastrel. And we strip
the wife of her children. We send her to the wash-
tub or the sewing-room, where she associates with
prostitutes and imbeciles. The little children, if they
T 65

Environment and Moral Progress

are under five, are taken to the workhouse nursery,
where they also are tended by prostitutes and imbe
ciles. There they remain, day after day, without ever
going down the workhouse steps until they are old
enough to go to the Poor Law school, or until they
are taken down in their coffins, owing to the terrible
mortality among the workhouse babies."

Of course, all workhouses are not so
bad as this, but many are, and have been
during the three-quarters of a century of
their existence. Can we, therefore, wonder
that week by week some poor and honest
parents commit suicide rather than see
their children starve, or be separated
from them in the workhouse ! The
people we thus drive to death are many
of them as good as we ourselves are ; yet
the " Guardians of the Poor" — well-to-do
gentlemen and ladies — go on administer
ing it week after week and year after year
without protest or apparent compunction.
Such is the deadening effect of long-con
tinued custom.

66

CHAPTER XII

INDICATIONS OF INCREASING MORAL DEGRA
DATION

THERE are in the Reports of the Registrar-
General a few statistics of special import
ance because they clearly point to certain
kinds of moral degradation which have
been increasing for the last half-century,
thus coinciding with our exceptionally
rapid increase in wealth; and also, as I
have shown in preceding chapters, with
various forms of national, economic, and
social deterioration.

The first of these is the continuous
increase in deaths from alcoholism, in
proportion to population, since the year
1861. Most persons will be amazed to
find that this is the case, because the
drinking habit has certainly diminished ;
but when the habit becomes so powerful
and lasts so long as to be the direct cause
of death, we are able to see the dimen
sions of the most exaggerated form of

67

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

the drink evil. The following figures are
taken from the successive Reports re
ferred to : —

Deaths from

Average Alcoholism per

of Years Million living

l86l—l865 . . . 41.6

1866—1870 . . -354

1871—1875 . . . 37.6

1876 — l88o . . . 42.4

1881—1885 . . . 48.2

1886—1890 . . . 56.0

1891 — 1895 . . . 67.8

1896—1900 . . . 85.8

1901 — 1905 . . . 78.4

1906 — igiO . . . 54.6

There are some irregularities, the ratio
being nearly equal for the first twenty
years, after which there is such a con
tinuous large increase that from 1876-80
to 1896-1900 the mortality is doubled, but
for the last ten years there has been a
decrease, which in the last five years is
very marked.

But a still worse and more disquiet
ing feature is the recent large increase
of mortality from alcoholism in women.
Figures for the separate sexes were not

68

Increasing Moral Degradation

given till 1876, and the following table
shows the comparison up to 1910 : —

Deaths from

A verage A Icoholism

of Years per Million

Men Women

1876 — l88o . . 60. 1 . . 24.0

1881—1885 .. 66.6 .. 31.0

1886 — 1890 . . 73.6 . . 39.2

1891 — 1895 . . 86.6 . . 50.2

1896 — 1900 . . 106.2 . . 66.6

1901—1905 .. 95.0 .. 63.0

1906 — 1910 . . 66.6 . . 43.6

These figures, however deplorable and
startling in themselves, are as nothing in
comparison with what they imply. Death
from drink, more than in the case of any
other disease, is the ultimate and rarely
attained result of the vice of habitual
intoxication. Men and women may greatly
injure their health, ruin their families,
and be disgraceful drunkards, and yet not
die of it, or make any near approach to
doing so. What is the proportion of those
who are morally and physically injured
by drink to those who kill themselves by
it, is, I suppose, unknown, but I imagine
that one in a thousand is, probably, too
high an estimate, and that one death

69

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

among ten thousand moderate drinkers
who also occasionally or frequently become
intoxicated, would be nearer the mark.
This would imply an increase in the con
sumption of alcoholic drinks, instead of
which there has been an actual diminu
tion. The fact probably is that a very
large number of moderate drinkers have
ceased to consume alcohol in any form,
and this would account for a much larger
reduction in the total than has actually
occurred.

On the other hand, owing to the
increase of those who are only casually
employed in our great cities, and whose
one luxury is the excitement of drink, a
larger quantity of cheap , and injuriously
adulterated spirits and other liquors is
consumed, which, combined with a defi
ciency of wholesome food, leads more
frequently to a fatal result.

Increase of Suicide

The increase has been long known and
generally admitted. It is supposed to be
largely due to the ever-increasing struggle
for subsistence in our great cities, the con
sequent increase of unemployment, and
the dread of the workhouse as the only

70

xii] Increasing Moral Degradation

alternative to starvation. The following
are the figures for the last forty -five
years for which official data have been
published : —

Million living

1866— 1870 . . . 66.4

1871 — 1875 . . . 66.0

1876—1880 . . . 73.6

1881—1885 . . . 73.8

1886 — 1890 . . . 79.4

1891—1895 . . . 88.6

1896 — 1900 . . . 89.2

1901 — 1905 . . . 100.6

1906 — igiO . . . 102.2

Such a table as this, occurring in a
country which boasts of its enormous
wealth, of its ever-increasing commercial
prosperity, of its marvellous advance in
science and the arts, and command of
natural forces, should, surely, give us
pause, and force upon us the conviction
that there is something radically wrong
in a social system which brings about
such terrible evils.

And this should be the more certainly
seen to be the case because the same

71

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

increase is taking place in all those coun
tries which approach us in their wealth
and their commercial prosperity.

There is a group of diseases which are
fatal to infants soon after birth. They
have been steadily increasing during the
last half-century, and call for special
notice here, as they seem to indicate
physical degeneration as well as personal
immorality of a dangerous and perhaps
even a criminal nature.

Proportion of Deaths

Five-year to 1,000 Births

Average Premature Congenital

Births Defects

1861 — 1865 . . 11.19 • • J-76

1866—1870 . , 11.50 . . 1.84

1871—1875 .. 12.60' .. 1.85

1876—1880 . . 13.38 . . 2.39

1881—1885 .. 14.18 .. 3.23

1886—1890 . . 16.1 . . 4.2
1891 — 1895 . . 18.4 . . 4.7
1896 — 1900 . . 19.6 . . 4.9

1901 — 1905 . . 20.2 . . 5.9

1906 — 1909 . . 20.0 . . 6.6

The large increase during the last
forty-five years of very early infantile
deaths, involving abnormalities of mother

72

xii] Increasing Moral Degradation

or child, seems very significant. The
first may be connected with the increas
ing dislike of child-bearing, and unsuc
cessful attempts to avoid it. The second
indicates some injurious condition of life
of the mother, such as working at un
healthy or even deadly trades, which has
certainly been largely increasing during
the same period. Such work for young
married women should be impossible in
a civilised community.

On the vast subject of prostitution, of
which the present movement for the sup
pression of what is called " The White
Slave Traffic " is but one of the aspects,
I do not propose to dwell, because I can
find no statistics to show whether it has
increased or decreased during the last
century. But as the conditions have all
been favourable for it, I have little doubt
that it has increased in proportion to
population. Such conditions are, the enor
mous growth of great cities ; an increasing
number of unmarried and wealthy young
men; with an enormous number of girls
and young women whose wages are insuf
ficient to provide them with the rational
enjoyments of life.

73

Environment and Moral Progress

The proceedings of the Divorce Courts
show other aspects of the result of wealth
and leisure ; while a friend who had been
a good deal in London Society assured
me that both in country houses and in
London various kinds of orgies were
occasionally to be met with which could
hardly have been surpassed in the Rome
of the most dissolute emperors.

Of war, too, I need say nothing. It
has always been more or less chronic
since the rise of the Roman Empire, but
there is now undoubtedly a disinclination
for war among all civilised peoples. Yet
the vast burden of armaments, taken
together with the most pious declarations
in favour of peace, must be held to show
an almost total absence of morality as
a guiding principle among the governing
classes. In this respect, the increasing
power of Labour - parties all over the
world seems to afford the only hope of a
real moral advance.

74

PART II.-THEORETIGAL

CHAPTER XIII

NATURAL SELECTION AMONG ANIMALS

WHILE writing the present volume I was
led to refer to it during some of the numer
ous interviews on the occasion of my recent
birthday. This led to some misrepresenta
tion of my views, and showed me how few
popular press-writers have any real know
ledge of the nature and extent of "natural
selection/' more especially as it affects the
human race. There is also the same ignor
ance as regards " heredity " ; and this latter
has become almost a word to conjure with,
and is thought by most writers to explain
many things to which it is quite inapplic
able, and as the present work is a very con
densed argument founded to a considerable
extent upon these great natural laws, I
propose devoting two chapters to ex
plaining and demonstrating the effect of

75

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

natural selection in the case of the lower
animals and of man respectively.

That such an explanation is necessary
may be seen from the following extract
from one of our most influential and
well-written daily papers, the Pall Mall
Gazette. After referring to the view of the
utter rottenness of our present civilisation,
it quotes me as saying : " And the average
of mankind will remain the same until
natural selection steps in to save it."
(What I actually said to the interviewer
was " until some form of selection
improves it." ) The writer then goes on :

" These words must have struck the interviewer
like the~crack of doom. For, stated popularly, the
theory of natural selection is the doctrine of ' Devil
take the hindmost.' If natural selection had fair
play there would be no Children's Care Committees ;
there would be no Poor Law, no Hospitals ; there
would be no Old Age Pensions. All the humanitarian
effort to care for the weak and to help them along
the path of life, every effort to bind up the broken
hearted, every combination of labour to secure
equality among the members of a trade, stand con
demned as futile or worse by the doctrine which
Dr. Russel Wallace thinks can alone raise the average
of man. His own remedies for the ills of society —
the levelling up which he believes to be impossible
without levelling down, the disinheriting of the un
born heir, the ' striking ' which he applauds, the

Selection in the Animal World

universal education which he favours — all these are
directly antagonistic to the workings of natural
selection."

Now, as I am credited by all my scientific
friends with having discovered the theory
of natural selection more than fifty years
ago, and as the whole reading public have
had this hammered into them with need
less repetition during the whole of that
period, it is rather amusing to be told now
that I do not know what natural selection
is, nor what it implies. It is also a striking
proof that the whole subject is now held
to be so old and commonplace as not to be
worth studying by a popular teacher before
writing about it so strongly and dogmatic
ally. If he had done so he would not
deliberately assert that I hold opinions in
regard to the matter which in several of
my books I have shown the fallacy of.

I propose, therefore, to give here a short
account of the essential features of the
theory of natural selection; how it has
operated in bringing about the evolution
of the almost infinitely varied forms of
plants and of the lower animals ; and also
to explain as clearly as I can why, and to
what extent, it has acted differently in the
case of man.

77

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

Lamarckism and Darwinism — How they
Differ

The first great naturalist who put for
ward a detailed explanation of how he
supposed the varied forms of animal life
to have been produced was Lamarck, a
contemporary of Buffon and Goethe, both
of whom believed in evolution but offered
no explanation of how it could have been
brought about. Lamarck, however, sug
gested that the various organs of animals
were modified by voluntary effort producing
increased development, as when an antelope
escapes from a lion by its swiftness, which
swiftness is increased by the straining of
its limbs in flight ; while the long neck and
fore-limbs of the giraffe were explained by
the continual stretching of these parts of
the body to obtain foliage for food during
severe droughts. In addition to this
other causes are at work, as described in
the following passage, translated or para
phrased by Sir Charles Lyell in his Prin
ciples of Geology :

" Every considerable alteration in the local con
ditions under which each race of animals exists causes
a change in their wants, and these new wants excite
them to new actions and habits. These actions
require the more frequent employment of some parts

78

Selection in the Animal World

before but slightly exercised, and then greater
development follows as a consequence of their more
frequent use. Other organs, no longer in use, are
impoverished and diminished in size ; nay, are
sometimes entirely annihilated, while in their place
new parts are insensibly produced for the discharge
of new functions."

Again, he says:

" Thus otters, beavers, water-fowl, turtles, and
frogs were not made web-footed in order that they
might swim ; but their wants having attracted them
to the water in search of prey, they stretched out
the toes of their feet to strike the water and move
rapidly along its surface. By the repeated stretching
of their toes the skin which united them at the base
acquired a habit of extension, until, in the course
of time, the broad membranes which now connect
their extremities were formed."

In the case of plants, where no volun
tary movements occur, the cause of modifi
cation was said to be due almost exclusively
to the change of local conditions, as the
various kinds of plants became dispersed
over the earth's surface. The influence of
soil, of temperature, of light and shade, are
supposed to produce definite changes which
are gradually increased ; just as plants long
cultivated in our gardens have become so
changed that the wild progenitors cannot
now be recognised.

79

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

Sir Charles Lyell, who made a careful
study of Lamarck's great work, notes
especially that the whole of the argument
is vague and general, and that no cases are
given in which is shown how the alleged
causes can be supposed to have acted so
as to bring about the innumerable changes
that must have occurred. What is more
important, however, is the failure to explain
how the numerous minute adaptations of
each species to its environment could have
arisen by the direct action of that environ
ment — in plants, the infinitely varied forms
of leaves, flowers, and fruits ; in animals,
the forms and sizes of the teeth of mammalia
and of the beaks, wings and feet of birds
to the food they obtain ; while the enormous
range of colour and marking in most groups
of animals are such as no amount of desire
or exertion on the one hand, or direct action
of external causes on the other, could
possibly have brought about. It is not,
therefore, surprising that, although a vast
amount of evidence was adduced to show
that changes had taken place leading to
the evolution of species from pre-existing
species, yet causes adequate to bring about
the changes, and especially those neces
sary to produce the marvellous adaptations

80

Selection in the Animal World

continually being discovered, had not been
shown to exist.

It is necessary to point this out, because
the difference between the almost universal
rejection of Lamarck's attempted solution
of the problem of evolution, and the almost
immediate and universal acceptance of that
adduced by Darwin, is otherwise unexplained.
The belief in the doctrine of evolution as the
only rational explanation of the gradual
development of the innumerable forms of
living things became more and more general.
The great body of arguments in its favour
were admirably set forth by Robert Cham
bers in his Vestiges of Creation, published
anonymously in 1844 ; while Herbert
Spencer's masterly exposition of the argu
ment for universal evolution convinced a
large number of naturalists and men of
science. But still the nature of the laws
and forces by which the evolution of the
organic world in all its variety and beauty,
could have been brought about remained
not only unknown but unimagined, so that
even so great a thinker as Sir John Herschel
termed it " the mystery of mysteries."
I will now state as briefly as possible the
essential features of Darwin's solution of
the mystery in his epoch-making work,
The Origin of Species.

G 81

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

Natural Selection as the Essential Factor
in the Origin of Species

There are two great, universal, and very
conspicuous characteristics of the whole
organic world which, because they are so
very common, were almost ignored before
Darwin showed their importance. These
are (i) the great variability in all common
and widespread species, and (2) their enor
mous powers of increase.

The facts of variability are recorded in
every book on Darwinism or on organic
evolution, and it is only necessary here to
appeal to the reader's own observation or
to state a few illustrative facts. Every
body sees that among a hundred or a
thousand people he knows or frequently
meets no two are alike. This is variability.
He also knows that the amount of the differ
ences between them is often very large,
and always, if you have any two of them
side by side, easily perceptible and capable
of being described. He also knows that
they differ in every part and organ that
can be seen : the height, the bulk of body ;
the shape of the hands, feet, head, ears,
nose, and mouth ; the proportions of the
legs, arms, and body to each other ; the

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Selection in the Animal World

abundance and character of the hair — coarse
or fine, straight or curly, and of all colours
between flaxen and intense black. To de
clare that variability among men and women,
even of the same race and in the same
country, is a rare phenomenon, and that in
amount it is infinitesimal, would be a
ludicrous misstatement of the facts or a
wilful perversion of the truth. But, as
regards animals or plants in a state of
nature, this misstatement has been made
and has been used as an argument against
the Darwinian theory. It is, however, now
well known, as a matter of direct observa
tion and measurement, that when a few
scores or hundreds of individuals are com
pared, even in the same district and at the
same season, they differ in their proportions
to about the same amount, and to some
extent in every visible part or organ, as
do human beings.

This, however, was not well known
when Darwin collected the materials for
his various works, and he even sometimes
makes the proviso — " if they vary, for
without variation selection can do no
thing"; and this has been taken as an
admission that variation is a rare instead
of being a universal phenomenon. He

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Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

also often spoke of the accumulation of
small or minute variations, and this has
led to the statement that variations are
infinitesimal in amount, and therefore could,
at first, be of no use to the possessor in the
struggle for existence.

Rapid Increase of All Organisms

This is another fact of Nature which
requires to be kept in mind in all dis
cussions of the action of natural selection,
yet it is often altogether ignored by
critics of the theory. As an illustrative
fact, a not uncommon European weed of
the Cruciferae family has been found to
produce about 700,000 seeds on a single
plant, whence it can be calculated that if
every seed had room to grow for three
successive years their produce would cover
a space of about 2,000 times as large as
the whole land surface of the globe. Some
of the minute aquatic forms of life which
increase by division in a few hours would,
if they all had the means of living, in the
same period occupy a space equal to that
of the entire solar system. Even the
largest and slowest breeding of all known
mammals, i.e. the elephant, would, if

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Selection in the Animal World

allowed space to live and breed freely
for 750 years, result in no less than nine
teen million animals.

By far the larger part of the criticisms
of Darwinism by popular writers are due
to their continually forgetting these two
great natural facts: enormous variability
about a mean value of every part and
organ ; and such ever-present powers of
multiplication that, even in the case of
vertebrate animals, of those born every
year only a small proportion — one-tenth
to one-hundredth or thereabouts — live over
the second year. If they all lived their
numbers would go on continually increas
ing, which we know is not the case. Hence
arises what has been termed " the struggle
for existence/' resulting in " the survival
of the fittest/'

This " struggle for life" is either
against the forces of inorganic or those of
organic nature. Among the former are
storms, floods, intense cold, long-continued
droughts, or violent blizzards, all of
which take toll of the weaker or less
wary individuals of each species — those
that are less adapted to survive such
conditions. In judging how this would
act, we must always remember the enor-

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Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

mous scale on which Nature works, and
that although now and then a few of the
weaker individuals may live and a few
of the stronger be killed, yet when we
deal with hundreds of millions, of which
eighty or ninety millions inevitably die
every year while about ten or twenty
millions only survive, it is impossible to
believe that those which survive, not one
year only but year after year through
out the whole existence of each species, are
not on the average better adapted to the
complex conditions of their environment
than those which succumb to it. It is a
mere truism that the fittest survive.

Exactly the same thing occurs in the
case of the organic environment, to which
each species must also be well adapted
in order to live. The two great essen
tials for animal existence are, to obtain
abundant food through successive years,
and to be able to escape from their vari
ous enemies. When food is scarce the
strongest, or those who can feed quickest
and digest more rapidly, or those that
can detect food at greater distances or
reach it more quickly, will have the ad
vantage. Enemies are escaped by strength,
by swiftness, by acute vision, by wariness,

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Selection in the Animal World

or by colours which conceal the various
species in their natural surroundings ; and
those which possess these or any other
advantages will in the long run survive.
The weaker, the less well-defended, and
the smaller species often have special pro
tection, such as nocturnal habits, making
burrows in the earth, possessing poison
ous stings or fangs, being covered with
protective armour ; while great numbers
are coloured or marked so as exactly to
correspond with their surroundings, and
are thus concealed from their chief enemies.

Natural Selection, or Survival of the
Fittest

It may be here noted that the term
" Natural Selection," which has often been
misunderstood, was suggested to Darwin
by the way in which almost all our varie
ties of cultivated plants and domestic
animals have been obtained from wild
forms continually improved for many
generations. The method is to breed
large quantities, and always preserve or
" select " the best in each generation
to be the parents of the next. This
method, carried on by hundreds of farmers,

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Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

gardeners, dog, horse or poultry breeders,
and especially by pigeon-fanciers, has re
sulted in all those useful, beautiful and
even wonderful varieties of fruits, vege
tables and flowers, dray-horses and hunters,
greyhounds, spaniels and bull-dogs, cows
which give large quantities of the richest
milk, and sheep with the greatest quan
tity and finest quality of wool. All these
were produced gradually for the special
purposes of mankind ; but a similar result
has been effected by Nature through
rapid increase, great variability, and con
tinual destruction of all the individuals
less adapted to the conditions of their
special environment, so that only the
strongest or the swiftest, the best-con
cealed or the most wary, the best armed
with teeth, horns, hoofs or claws, those
who could swim best, or those that pro
tected each other by keeping in flocks or
herds — lived the longest and tended to
improve still further the next generation.
"Survival of the fittest" was suggested
by Herbert Spencer as best describing
exactly what happens, and it is a most
useful descriptive term which should al
ways be kept in mind when discussing or
investigating the process by which the

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Selection in the Animal World

infinitely varied and beautiful productions
of Nature have been developed. There
is really not one single part or organ of
any plant or animal that cannot have
been derived by means of the fundamental
facts of variability and reproduction from
some allied plant or animal.

It is interesting here to note, that the
two essential factors of the process of con
stant adaptation to the environment by
great variability and rapid multiplication,
formed no part of Lamarck's theory, which
some people still think to be as good as
Darwin's. Equally suggestive is the fact
that, while extensive groups of life-pheno
mena, such as colour, weapons, hair, scales,
and feathers, can hardly be conceived as
having been produced or modified by
effort or by the direct action of the environ
ment, they are yet, every one of them,
perfectly explained by the fundamental
and necessary processes of variability and
survival, acting slowly and continuously,
but with intermittent periods of extreme
activity at long intervals, on all living
things.

One of the weakest and most foolish
of all the objections to the Darwinian
theory is, that it does not explain varia-

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Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

tion, and is therefore worthless. We might
as well % say that Newton's discovery of
the laws of gravitation was worthless
because its cause was not and has not
yet been discovered ; or that the un-
dulatory theory of light and heat is worth
less, because the origin of the ether, the
thing that undulates, is not known. The
beginnings of things can never be known ;
and, as Darwin well said, it is foolish to
waste time in speculation about them. I
think I have shown in my World of Life
that infinite variability is a basic law of
Nature, and have suggested its probable
purpose. That purpose seems to have
been the development of a life-world cul
minating in Man — a being capable of
studying, and enjoying, and to some extent
comprehending, the vast universe around
him, from the microscopic life in almost
every drop of water to the whirling
nebulae of the glittering star-depths ex
tending to almost unimaginable distances
around him.

Looking at him thus, man is as much
above, and as different from, the beasts
that perish as they are above and beyond
the inanimate masses of meteoritic matter
which, as we now know, occupy the appar-

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Selection in the Animal World

ently vacant spaces of our solar system,
and from which comets and stars are in
all probability the aggregations due to
the action of the various cosmic forces
which everywhere seem capable of produc
ing variety and order out of a more uni
form but less orderly chaos.

But besides this lofty intellect, man
is gifted with what we term a moral sense :
an insistent perception of justice and in
justice, of right and wrong, of order and
beauty and truth, which as a whole con
stitute his moral and aesthetic nature, the
origin and progress of which I have en
deavoured to throw some light upon in
the present volume. The long course of
human history leads us to the conclusion
that this higher nature of man arose at
some far distant epoch, and though it
has developed in various directions, does
not seem yet to have elevated the whole
race much above its earliest condition,
at the time when, by the influx of some
portion of the spirit of the Deity, man
became "a living soul/*

We will now consider some of the
changes which this higher nature of man
has produced in the action of the laws of
variation and natural selection. These are

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very important, and are so little under
stood that almost all popular writers on
the subject of the future of mankind are
led into stating as scientific conclusions
what are wholly opposed to the actual
teaching of evolution.

92

CHAPTER XIV

SELECTION AS MODIFIED BY MIND

THE theory of natural selection as ex
pounded by Darwin was so completely
successful in explaining the origin of the
almost infinitely varied forms of the organic
world, step by step, during the long suc
cession of the geological ages, that it was
naturally supposed to be equally applicable
to mankind. This was thought to be almost
certain when, in his later work, The Descent
of Man, Darwin proved by a series of con
verging facts and convincing arguments
that the physical structure of man was in
all its parts and organs so extremely similar
to that of the anthropoid apes as to demon
strate the descent of both from some
common ancestor.

So close is this resemblance that every
bone and muscle in the human body has
its counterpart in that of the apes, the only
differences being slight modifications in
their shape and position ; yet these differ
ences lead to external forms, attitudes, and

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Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

modes of life so divergent that we can
hardly recognise the close affinity that really
exists. This affinity is so real and unmis
takable that such a great and conservative
zoologist as the late Sir Richard Owen
declared that to discover and define any
important differences between them was
the anatomist's difficulty. It was in the
dimensions, the shape, and the proportions
of the brain that Owen found a sufficient
amount of distinctive characters to enable
him to place Man in a separate order of
mammals — Bimana, or two-handed — while
the remainder of the whole monkey tribe —
including the apes, baboons, monkeys, and
lemurs — formed the order Quadrumana, or
four-handed animals. This classification
has been rejected by most modern biologists,
who consider man to form a distinct family
only — Hominidae — of the order Primates,
which order includes all four-handed
animals as well as man.

But if we recognise the brain as the organ
of the mind, and give due weight to the
complete distinctness and enormous supe
riority of the mind of man as compared with
that of all other mammals, we shall be in
clined to accept Owen's view as the most
natural ; and this becomes almost certain

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Selection Modified by Mind

when we realise the enormous effect his
mind has produced, in modifying and almost
neutralising the action of that great law of
natural selection which has held supreme
sway in every other portion of the organic
world.

We have seen in the preceding chapter
how every form of organic life during all the
vast extent of geological time has been sub
ject to the law of natural selection, which
has incessantly moulded their bodily form
and structure, external and internal, in strict
adaptation to the successive changes of the
world around them ; while that world was
itself hardly, if at all, modified by them. A
few isolated cases — such as the formation
of islands by the coral-forming zoophytes,
or the damming of a few rivers by the rude
though very remarkable labours of the
beaver — can hardly be considered as form
ing exceptions to this law.

But so soon as man appeared upon the
earth, even in the earliest periods at which
we have any proofs of his existence, or in
the lowest state of barbarism in which we
are now able to study him, we find him
able to use and act upon the forces of
Nature, and to modify his environment,
both inorganic and organic, in ways which

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Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

formed a completely new departure in the
entire organic world.

Among the very rudest of modern sav
ages the wounded or the sick are assisted,
at least with food and shelter, and often in
other ways, so that they recover under cir
cumstances that to most of the higher
animals would be fatal. Neither does less
robust health or vigour, or even the loss
of a limb or of eyesight, necessarily entail
death. The less fit are therefore not elimin
ated as among all other animals ; and we be
hold, for the first time in the history of the
world, the great law of natural selection by
the survival only of " the fittest " to some
extent neutralised.

But this is only the first and least import
ant of the effects produced 'by the superior
faculties of man. In the whole animal
world, as we have seen, every species is
preserved in harmony with the slowly
changing environment by modifications of
its own organs or faculties, thus gradually
leading to the production of new species
equally adapted to the new environment as
its ancestor was before the change occurred.

In the case of man, however, such bodily
adaptations were unnecessary, because his
greatly superior mind enabled him to meet

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Selection Modified by Mind

all such difficulties in a new and different
way. As soon as his specially human
faculties were developed (and we have as
yet no knowledge of him in any earlier con
dition), he would cease to be influenced by
natural selection in his physical form and
structure. Looked at as a mere animal he
would remain almost stationary, the changes
in the surrounding universe ceasing to pro
duce in him that powerful modifying effect
which they exercise over all other members
of the entire organic world. In order to pro
tect himself from the larger and fiercer of
the mammalia he made use of weapons, such
as stone-headed clubs, wooden spears, bows
and arrows, and various kinds of traps and
snares, all of which are exceedingly effective
when families or larger groups combine in
their use. Against the severity of the
seasons he protected himself with a clothing
of skins, and with some form of shelter or
well-built house, in which he could rest
securely at night, free from tempestuous
rains or the attacks of wild beasts. By the
use of fire he was enabled to render both
roots and flesh more palatable and more
digestible, thus increasing the variety and
abundance of his food far beyond that of
any species of the lower animals. Yet
» 97

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

further, by the simplest forms of cultiva
tion, he was able to increase the best of the
fruits, the roots, the tubers, as well as the
more nutritious of the seeds, such as those
of rice and maize, of wheat and of barley,
thus securing in convenient proximity to
his dwelling-place an abundance of food to
supply all his wants and render him almost
always secure against scarcity or famine or
disastrous droughts.

We see, then, that with the advent of
Man there had come into existence a being
in whom that subtle force we term mind
became of far more importance than mere
bodily structure. Though with a naked
and unprotected body, this gave him cloth
ing against the varied inclemencies of the
seasons. Though unable to 'compete with
the deer in swiftness or with the wild bull
in strength, this gave him weapons with
which to capture or overcome both. Though
less capable than most other animals of
living on the herbs and the fruits that
unaided Nature supplies, this wonderful
faculty taught him to govern and direct
Nature to his own benefit, and compelled
her to produce food for him almost where
and when he pleased. From the moment
when the first skin was used as a covering,

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Selection Modified by Mind

when the first rude spear was formed to
assist him in the chase, when fire was first
used to cook his food, when the first seed
was sown or shoot planted, a grand revo
lution was effected in Nature — a revolution
which in all previous ages of the earth's
history had had no parallel. A being had
arisen who was no longer subject to bodily
change with changes of the physical universe
— a being who was in some degree superior
to Nature, inasmuch as he knew how to
control and regulate her action, and could
keep himself in harmony with her, not
through any change in his body, but by
means of his vast superiority in mind.

The view above expounded of the trans
ference of the action of natural selection
from the bodily structure to the mind of
early man was my first original modifica
tion of that theory, having been communi
cated to the Anthropological Review in 1864.
It received the approval both of Darwin
himself and of Herbert Spencer, and I am
not aware that anyone has shown any flaw
in the reasoning by which it is established.
It is certainly of high importance, since if
true it renders impossible any important
change in the external form of mankind,

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Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

while it serves as an explanation of the com
plete identity of specific type of the three
great races of man — the Caucasian or white,
the Mongolian or yellow, and the Negroid
or black— in every essential of human form
and structure, while in their best examples
they approach very nearly to the same
ideal of symmetry and of beauty. Yet so
little attention has been given to this view
that most popular and even some scientific
writers take it for granted that no such
difference exists between man and the
lower animals. They assume that we are
destined to have our bodies modified in
the remote future in some unknown way,
and that the idea that there is anything
approaching final perfection in the human
form is a mere figment of the imagination.
Others are so imbued with the univer
sality of natural selection as a beneficial law
of Nature that they object to our interfer
ing with its action in, as they urge, the
elimination of the unfit by disease and
death, even when such diseases are caused
by the insanitary conditions of our modern
cities or the misery and destitution due to
our irrational and immoral social system.
Such writers entirely ignore the undoubted
fact that affection, sympathy, compassion

100

xiv] Selection Modified by Mind

form as essential a part of human nature as
do the higher intellectual and moral facul
ties ; that in the very earliest periods of
history and among the very lowest of exist
ing savages they are fully manifested, not
merely between the members of the same
family, but throughout the whole tribe,
and also in most cases to every stranger
who is not a known or imagined enemy.
The earliest book of travels I remember
hearing read by my father was that of
Mungo Park, one of the first explorers of
the Niger. He was once alone and sick
there, and some negro women nursed him,
fed him, and saved his life ; and while lying
in their hut he heard them singing about
him as the poor white man, of whom they
said : —

" He has no mother to give him milk,
No wife to grind his corn."

Hospitality is, in fact, one of the most
general of all human virtues, and in some
cases is almost a religion. It is an inherent
part of what constitutes " human nature/'
and it is directly antagonistic to the rigid
law of natural selection which has univer
sally prevailed throughout the lower animal
world. Those who advocate our allowing

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natural selection to have free play among
ourselves on the ground that we are interfer
ing with Nature, are totally ignorant of
what they are talking about. It is Nature
herself, untaught, unsophisticated human
nature, which they are seeking to interfere
with. They seek to degrade the higher
nature to the level of the lower, to bring
down Heaven-born humanity, in its essen
tial characteristics only a little lower than
the angels, to the infinitely lower level of
the beasts that perish.

The conclusion reached in the earlier
portion of this volume, that the higher in
tellectual and moral nature of man has been
approximately stationary during the whole
period of human history, and that the cause
of the phenomenon has been the absence of
any selective agency adequate to increase
it, renders it necessary to give some further
explanation as to the probable or possible
origin of this higher nature, and also of that
admirable human body which also appears
to have reached a condition of permanent
stability.

102

CHAPTER XV

THE LAWS OF HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT

IN dealing with the great problems of
organic development there is probably no
department in which so much error and
misconception prevails as on the nature
and limitations of Heredity. These mis
conceptions not only pervade most popu
lar writings on the subject of evolution,
but even those of men of science and of
specialists in biology, and they are the
more important and dangerous because
their promulgators are able to quote Her
bert Spencer, and to a less extent Darwin,
as holding similar views.

The subject is of special importance
here because it involves the question of
whether the effects of the environment,
including education and training, are in
any degree transmitted from the indivi
duals so modified to their progeny -
whether they are or are not cumulative.
It is, in fact, the much discussed and
vitally important problem of the Heredity

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Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

of Acquired Characters. The effects of
use and disuse, another form of the same
general phenomenon, were assumed by
Lamarck to be inherited, and a large por
tion of his theory of evolution rested on
this assumption ; it seemed so probable,
and was apparently supported by so many
facts, that Darwin, like most other natural
ists at the time, accepted it without any
special inquiry, and when he worked out
his theory of Pangenesis in order to ex
plain the main facts of heredity, his sup
positions were adapted to include such
phenomena. Let us then first explain
what is meant by the " acquired charac
ters " which it was thought that a true
theory of heredity must explain.

As a rule, the great majority of the
peculiarities of any species of animal or
plant are constantly reproduced in its
offspring. The short tail of the wren,
the much longer tail of the long-tailed tit,
the crest of the crested tit and of in
numerable other birds, always when
full-grown exhibit the same characters as
in their parents. These are said to be
innate characters. In rare cases, how
ever, offspring are born which differ mate
rially from their parents, as when a white
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xv] Heredity and Environment

blackbird or a six-toed kitten appears,
but these are equally innate, and are often
strongly inherited. All these are subject
to variation, and can therefore be modi
fied by selection, whether natural or arti
ficial, and the effects of such selection in
the case of domestic animals is often
enormous. Such are the pouters and
tumblers among pigeons, the bull-dog
and the greyhound, the numerous breeds
of poultry, all of which are known to have
been produced by artificial selections of
favourable variations extending over many
centuries ; and the characters of these
varieties are all strongly inherited.

Characters which are acquired during
the life of the individual owing to differ
ences in the use of certain organs or of
exposure to light, heat, drought, wind,
moisture, etc., are comparatively very
slight, and are liable to be so combined
with innate characters and with the effects
of natural or artificial selection, that it is
exceedingly difficult to ascertain, without
such careful and long-continued experi
ments as have not yet been made, whether
they are in any degree transmissible from
parent to offspring, and therefore cumula
tive.

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Environment and Moral Progress [at.

Almost every individual case of sup
posed inheritance of such characters, when
carefully examined, has been found to be
explicable in other ways ; but there is
a very large amount of general evidence,
demonstrating that even if a certain small
amount of such inheritance exists, it can
certainly not be a factor of any import
ance in the process of organic evolution,
all the factors of which must be univers
ally present because the process itself is
universal. I will therefore here limit my
self to a short enumeration of a few of the
very numerous cases in which the con
tinued use of an organ does not strengthen
or improve it, but often the reverse ; and
of others in which it cannot be asserted
that the action of the ehvironment can
have had any part whatever in the con
tinuous change or specialisation of the
part or organ. The number, size, form,
position, and composition of the teeth of
all the mammalia are extremely varied,
and throughout the whole class afford the
best characters to distinguish family and
generic groups ; they are therefore of
great value in determining the affinities of
extinct forms, because the jaws and teeth,
especially the latter, are most frequently

I Ob

xvj Heredity and Environment

preserved. But as the permanent teeth
are always fully formed while buried in
the jawbones and covered by the gums, it
is quite certain that the special adaptation
of the teeth of each species to seize, crush,
tear, or grind up its particular food can
not possibly have been produced by the
act of feeding, the effect of which is almost
always to grind away the teeth and render
them less serviceable. Such adaptation
could not possibly have been produced by
use alone, or any other direct action of
the environment. Yet, as the adapta
tion is clear, and often very remarkable,
some eminent palaeontologists have de
clared it to be proved that the changes
in them were produced by the changes
in the environment, and that they con
stitute very strong evidence of the
" inheritance of acquired characters " —a
statement unsupported by any direct
evidence.

The same objection applies to most of
the special organs of sense. The internal
organ of hearing is a highly complex series
of bones and membranes, protected by
the outer ear ; but it cannot be even
imagined to have been gradually deve
loped by the action of the air waves the

107

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

vibrations of which it conveys to the
brain.

The eye is a still more striking case,
as too much use injures or even destroys
it ; while specialities of vision, as long or
short sight, are undoubtedly innate, and
usually persist throughout life.

So the wonderfully varied bills of birds
cannot be conceived as having been modi
fied by use, and are, in fact, unchange
able when once formed. Yet, as they
vary largely in every species, they are
readily modified, so as to become adapted
to new conditions by the " survival of the
fittest/'

^Equally impossible is it to connect any
use or disuse, or environmental action,
in the production, the gradual develop
ment, or complete adaptation to their
conditions of life of the outer coverings
of almost all living things — the hair of
mammalia, the feathers of birds, the scales
or horny skins or solid shields of reptiles,
the solid shells of molluscs, wonderfully
ribbed or spined, whorled, or turreted, and
infinitely varied in surface colour and
markings. Even more conclusive are the
facts presented by the vast hosts of the
insect world, from the massive armour of
1 08

xv] Heredity and Environment

the ever-present beetle tribe, more varied
in form, structure, ornament, and colour
than any other comparable group of living
things, to the widely different lepidoptera,
equalling, or perhaps surpassing, the whole
class of birds in their marvellous grace and
beauty, yet all utterly beyond any pos
sible direct action of the environment or
of use and disuse in their development,
and their close adaptation to that environ
ment.

Organic nature is indisputably one
and indivisible. It has been developed
throughout by means of the fundamental
forces of life, of growth and reproduction,
and the equally fundamental laws of varia
tion, heredity, and enormous increase, re
sulting in a perpetual adaptation in form,
structure, colour, and habits to the slowly
changing environment. These forces and
laws are universal in their action ; they
are demonstrably adequate to the pro
duction of the whole of the phenomena
we are now discussing. We see, then,
that over by far the greater part of the
whole world of life any modification of
external structure, form, or colouring during
the life of the individual is impossible ;
while in the remainder its action, if it

109

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

exists at all, is of very limited range. No
adequate proof of the inheritance of the
slight changes thus caused has ever yet
been given, and it is therefore wholly
unnecessary and illogical to assume its
existence and to adduce it as having any
part in the ever-active and universal
process of evolution.

Throughout the whole series of the
animal world, and especially in the higher
groups which approach nearest to our
selves, mental and physical characters are
so inextricably intermixed in their rela
tion to the laws of evolution and heredity,
that either of them studied separately
leads us to the same conclusions. We are
not, therefore, surprised to find that
breeders of animals of all 'kinds act upon
the principle that all the qualities of the
various stocks, whether bodily or mental,
are innate and have been due to selec
tion ; while training, though necessary to
bring out the good qualities of the indivi
dual, has had no part in the production
of those qualities. When a horse or dog
of good pedigree is accidentally injured
so that it cannot be regularly trained, it
is still used for breeding purposes with
out any doubt as to its conveying to
no

xv] Heredity and Environment

its progeny the highest qualities of its
parentage.

In the case of the human race, how
ever, many writers thoughtlessly speak of
the hereditary effects of strength or skill
due to any mechanical work or special
art being continued generation after gene
ration in the same family, as among the
castes of India. But of any progressive
improvement there is no evidence what
ever. Those children who had a natural
aptitude for the work would, of course,
form the successors of their parents, and
there is no proof of anything hereditary
except as regards this innate aptitude.

Many people are alarmed at the state
ment that the effects of education and
training are not hereditary, and think that
if that were really the case there would be
no hope of improvement of the race ; but
closer consideration will show them that
if the results of our education in the widest
sense, in the home, in the shop, in the
nation, and in the world at large, had
really been hereditary, even in the slightest
degree, then indeed there would be little
hope for humanity ; and there is no clearer
proof of this than the fact that we have
not all been made much worse — the wonder
in

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

being that any fragment of morality, or
humanity, or the love of truth or justice
for their own sakes still exists among us.

If we glance through the past history
of mankind we see an almost unbroken
succession of aggression and combat be
tween the various races, nations, and
tribes. We can dimly see that this con
tinual struggle did lead to a rather severe
process of selection, as in the lower animal
world. It can hardly be doubted that as
a result of these struggles the strongest
physically, the most ingenious in the use
of weapons, and the best organised for
war did survive, and that the weaker and
lower were either exterminated or kept
as slaves by the conquerors. This leads
to alternation of success and failure. We
see great conquerors and great material
civilisations as a result of their accumula
tions of wealth and of slaves. Then, for
a time, luxury and the arts flourished, and
with them came rulers who encouraged
degradation and vice at home, supported
by more and more remote conquests.
Then new conquerors arose, often lower
in civilisation — barbarians, as they were
termed — but higher in the simple domestic

112

xv] Heredity and Environment

virtues and a more natural life of pro
ductive labour. These again, or some por
tions of them, rose to luxury and civilisa
tion, to lives of gross sensuality and the
most cruel despotism, till outraged humanity
raised up new conquerors to go over again
the old terrible routine.

The periods of culmination of these
old civilisations, founded always on con
quest, massacre, and slavery, are marked
out for us by the ruins of great cities,
temples, and palaces, often of wonderful
grandeur, and with indications of arts,
science, and literature which still excite
our admiration in Egypt and India, Greece
and Rome ; and thence through the
Middle Ages down to our own time. But
the inhumanities and horrors of these
periods are inconceivable. A gloomy pic
ture of them is given in that powerful
book, The Martyrdom of Man, by Win-
wood Reade ; and they are summarised
in Burns' fine lines :

" Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn."

Think of the horrors of war in the
perpetual wars of those days before the
" Red Cross " service did anything to
i 113

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

alleviate them. Think of the old castles,
many of which had besides the dungeons
a salaried torturer and executioner. Think
of the systematic tortures of the centuries,
of the witchcraft mania and of the Inquisi
tion. Think of the burnings in Smith-
field and in every great city of Europe.
Think of

" Truth for ever on the scaffold,
Wrong for ever on the throne."

Freedom of speech, even of thought, were
everywhere crimes : how, then, did the love
of truth survive as an ideal of to-day ? To
escape these horrors, the gentle, the good,
the learned, and the peaceful had to seek
refuge in monasteries and nunneries, while
by means of the celibacy of the clergy the
Church, as Galton tells us, " by a policy
singularly unwise and suicidal, brutalised
the breed of our forefathers."

Here was the actual education of the
world as man rose from barbarism to civil
isation, and it was accompanied by a cer
tain amount of retrograde selection by the
cruel punishments, confinement in dun
geons, or torture and death of those who
opposed the rulers, and by the survival of
the worst tools of the lords and tyrants.
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xv] Heredity and Environment

Ought we not to be thankful that such
education and custom, the varied influences
of such an environment, were not hereditary ?
And is not the fact that the whole world
has not become utterly degraded, and that
anything good remains in our cruelly
oppressed human nature, an overwhelming
proof that such influences are not here
ditary ?

When we remember that many of these
degrading laws and customs, oppressions,
and punishments have extended down to
our own times ; that the terrible slave-
trade and the equally terrible slavery have
only been abolished within the memory of
many of us ; and that the system of wage-
slavery, the distinction of classes, the gross
inequality of the law, the overwork of our
labouring millions, the immoral luxury and
idleness of our upper-class thousands, while
far more thousands die annually of want of
the bare necessaries of life ; that millions
have their lives shortened by easily pre
ventable causes, while other millions pass
their whole lives in continuous and almost
inhuman labour in order to provide means
for the enjoyments and pernicious luxuries
of the rich — we must be amazed at the fact
that there is nevertheless so much real

"5

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

goodness, real humanity, among us as cer
tainly exists, in spite of all the degrading
influences that I have been compelled here
to enumerate.

To myself, there seems only one ex
planation of the very remarkable and almost
incredible result just stated. It is, that the
Divine nature in us — that portion of our
higher nature which raises us above the
brutes, and the influx of which makes us
men — cannot be lost, cannot even be per
manently deteriorated by conditions how
ever adverse, by training however senseless
and bad. It ever remains in us, the central
and essential portion of our human nature,
ready to respond to every favourable oppor
tunity that arises, to grasp and hold firm
every fragment of high thought or noble
action that has been brought to its notice,
to oppose even to the death every falsehood
in teaching, every tyranny in action. The
ethics of Plato and of the great moralists of
the Ciceronian epoch, together with those
of Jesus and of His disciples and follow
ers, kept alive the sacred flame of pure
humanity, and their preservation consti
tutes perhaps the greatest service the
monastic system rendered to the human
race. This service is finely expressed by an
116

xv] Heredity and Environment

almost unknown poet, J. H. Dell, in the
prefatory to his volume, The Dawning Grey.
Never has our indebtedness to the classical
writers been more powerfully insisted on
than in the following lines : —

" Hear ye not the measured footfalls echoing solemn

and sublime,
From the groves of Academus down the avenues

of Time ;
See'st thou not the giant figures of the Sages of

the Past,
Through the darken'd long perspective on the

living foreground cast ;
Feel'st thou not the thrilling rhythm of the grand

old Grecian line,
Pulsing to the march of Progress, cadencing her

hymn divine,
All the forces of the present by the subtle sparks

controlled,
Of the quickening Grecian fire, of the mighty Lights

of old.

" Through the dark and desolation of the centuries
between,

Still ' The Porch's ' glories glimmer, still ' The Gar
den's ' wreaths are green.

Still the Zeno, still the Plato, still the Pyrrho
points the page,

Still the Philip fears the pebble— still Melitus dreads
the Sage,

Still the Dionysius trembles at the stylus of the
age,

"7

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

Still the dauntless ranks of Freedom kindle to

Tyrtaeus' song ;
Still they bear aloft the symbol — bear the glorious

torch along."*

If the Christian Church had done nothing
for us but preserve in its monasteries and
abbeys the finest examples of classic litera
ture that have come down to us, and given
us those glories of Gothic architecture which
seem to express in stone the grandeur and
sublimity, the peacefulness and the beauty
of a pure religion, it would, notwithstanding
its many defects, its cruelty and oppression,
its opposition to the study of nature and
to freedom of thought, have fully justified
its existence as helping us to realise what
ever more advanced and purer civilisation
the immediate future may/ have in store
for us.

Some Light on the Problem of Evil

Before passing on to another branch of
my subject I feel it necessary to make a few
suggestions in reply to the objection that
will certainly and very properly be made,
as to why, if our higher human nature is in
its essence Divine, it has suffered such long
and terrible eclipses — why has the lower

* See Note on page 124.

118

xv] Heredity and Environment

so often and for so long prevailed over
the higher ? This is, of course, one of the
many forms of the old problem of the origin
of evil, which is no doubt insoluble by us.
But as it is a fairly well-defined and limited
portion of that problem it may be possible
to obtain some idea of a possible solution,
and as such an one has occurred to myself
during the composition of the present
volume, I will give it as briefly as possible
in the hope that it may interest some of
my readers.

In my recent works, Man's Place in the
Universe and The World of Life, the con
clusion was forced upon me, that the scheme
of the development of the universe of stars
and nebulae with which we are acquainted,
and especially of our sun and solar system,
was such as to furnish the exact conditions
on our earth, and there only, which should
allow of the origin and evolution of the
organic world culminating in man. Yet
further, that the conditions should be such
as to produce the maximum of diversity
both of inorganic and organic products use
ful to man, and such as would aid in the
development of the greatest possible diver
sity of character and especially of his higher
mental and moral nature. What I have

119

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

here termed the Divine influx, which at
some definite epoch in his evolution at once
raised man above the rest of the animals,
creating as it were a new being with a
continuous spiritual existence in a world or
worlds where eternal progress was possible
for him. To prepare him for this progress
with ever-increasing diversity, faculties of
enormous range were required, and these
needed development in every direction
which earthly conditions rendered possible.
In order that this extreme diversity of
character should be brought about, a great
space of time, as measured by successive
generations, was necessary, though utterly
insignificant as compared with the preceding
duration of organic life on the earth, and
still more insignificant as compared with
the spirit-life to succeed it. It is for this
purpose, perhaps, that languages become so
rapidly diverse and mutually unintelligible
after a moderate period of isolation, bind
ing together small or moderate communities
in distinct tribes or nations, which each
develop in their own way under the influ
ence of special physical surroundings and
originate peculiarities of habits, customs,
and modes of thought. Antagonisms soon
arise between adjacent tribes, leading each

120

xv] Heredity and Environment

to protect itself against others by means of
chiefs and some quasi-military combinations.
This requires organisation and foresight, and
after a time the most powerful conquers
the weaker, they intermingle, and still
greater diversity arises. By this constant
struggle the less advanced suffer most, and
the race as a whole takes a step forward
in the march of civilisation.

We see the best example of this mode
of progress by antagonism in the small
States of Ancient Greece, where each little
kingdom developed its peculiar form of art,
of government, and of civilisation, which it
transferred to all parts of Europe ; and
after two thousand years of degradation by
Roman and Turkish conquest, its language
still remains but little altered, while its
ancient literature and art are still un
surpassed. In like manner Rome brought
law, literature, and military discipline to an
equally high level ; and it too sank into a
state of ruin and degradation, while its
literature and its law continued to illumi
nate the civilised world during its long
struggle towards freedom. Wherever con
ditions were favourable to progress in art
or science, time was needed for its full
growth and development ; while perpetual

121

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

war necessitated organisation and training
against conquest or destruction. Even the
cruelties and massacres by despotic rulers
excited at last the uprising of the op
pressed, and so developed the nobler attri
butes of patriotism, courage, and love of
freedom. In the very worst of times there
was an undercurrent of peaceful labour,
art, and learning, slowly moulding nations
towards a higher state of civilisation.

The point of view now suggested will
perhaps be rendered somewhat more in
telligible if we apply it to the nineteenth
century, of which I have written in such
condemnatory terms. The preceding eigh
teenth century was undoubtedly a some
what stationary epoch, of a rather common
place character alike in literature, in art, in
science, and in social life. Its vices also
were low, its government bad, its system
of punishments cruel, and its recognition of
slavery degrading. It was a kind of " dark
age " between the literary and national
brilliance of the Elizabethan age and the
wonderful scientific and industrial advance
of the Victorian age.

But this latter period was also a period
of a great uprising of the specially human
virtues of justice, of pity, of the love of

122

xv] Heredity and Environment

freedom, and of the importance of educa
tion ; and though the rapid increase of
wealth through the utilisation of natural
forces led to all the evils due to the un
checked growth of individual riches and
power, yet these very evils in all their
intensity and horror were perhaps neces
sary to excite in a sufficient number of
minds the determination to get rid of them.
Time was also required for the workers to
learn their own power, and, very gradually,
to learn how to use it. The rick-burning
and machine-breaking of the early part of
the century have been succeeded by com
bination and strikes ; step by step political
power has been gained by the masses ; but
only now, in the twentieth century, are
they beginning to learn how to use their
strength in an effective manner. There are,
however, indications that the whole march
of progress has been dangerously rapid,
and it might have been safer if the great
increases of knowledge and the vast accumu
lations of wealth had been spread over two
centuries instead of one. In that case our
higher nature might have been able to keep
pace with the growing evils of superfluous
wealth and increasing luxury, and it might
have been possible to put a check upon

123

Environment and Moral Progress

them before they had attained the full
power for evil they now possess.

Nevertheless, the omens for the future
are good. The great body of the more
intelligent workers are determined to have
JUSTICE. They insist upon the abolition of
monopolies of the forces of nature, and upon
the gradual admission of all to equal oppor
tunities for labour by free access to their
native soil. Thus may be initiated the
birth of a new era of peaceful reform and
moral advancement.

NOTE. — As many of my readers may not under
stand the allusions in the second verse of Mr. Dell's
poem (pp. 117-118), I append the explanation :

" The Porch," the place where the Stoic philo
sophers taught — The Painted Porch in Athens.

" The Garden," scene of Plato's and Socrates'
teaching.

Zeno was the founder of the Stoic philosophy.

Pyrrho was the founder of the Sceptic school.

Philip of Macedon lost an eye at the siege of
Methone by a slinger's pebble.

Melitus was one of the disputants with Socrates,
and was always vanquished by him.

Dionysius, the Tyrant of Syracuse, was also
a Poet and was a candidate for the prize at the
Olympic games, but was conquered and therefore
feared the more skilful " stylus " (pen) of the victors.

Tyrtseus, a lame schoolmaster of Athens, inspired
the Lacedaemonians by his patriotic war-songs, and
thus contributed largely to their victories.

124

CHAPTER XVI

MORAL PROGRESS THROUGH A NEW FORM
OF SELECTION

MANY readers, and some writers of books
on organic evolution, seem quite unaware
that Darwin established two modes of
selection, both alike " natural' ' but acting
in different ways and producing somewhat
different results. He termed the second
mode " sexual selection/' and in his Origin
of Species he briefly describes it as con
sisting in the fighting of males for the
possession of females, which undoubtedly
occurs in numbers of the higher vertebrates
and also in insects.

But he also includes under sexual selec
tion another mode of rivalry by the dis
play of the special male ornaments of
many birds, and the choice of the more
ornamental by the females. To this latter
phase he devotes nearly half his volume
on The Descent of Man, and on Selection in
Relation to Sex. Selection by the fighting
of males has led to the development of the
"5

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

stag's antlers, the boar's tusks, and the
lion's mane serving as a shield. These
combats rarely lead to the death of the
vanquished, but to a larger number of off
spring for the victor ; and this leads to the
improvement of the race by keeping up
its strength, vigour, and fighting power.

The other form of selection, by the dis
play of ornaments by male birds and the
supposed continuous development of those
ornaments by the appreciative choice of the
females, I believe to be imaginary. I have
discussed this subject in many of my books,
and my views are now generally adopted
by evolutionists. The fact that the colours
of male insects, especially butterflies, are
almost exactly parallel to those of birds,
first led me to this conclusion, because we
can hardly suppose insects to be endowed
with any aesthetic sense, even if they really
see colour at all, which, in my last book, I
have given strong reasons for doubting.

But in the human race the conditions
are altogether different ; for while, as I
have shown in Chapter XIV., the kind of
natural selection which through all the ages
had moulded the infinitely varied animal
forms into harmony with their environment,
ceased to act upon man's body and only

126

xvi] Progress Through Selection

for a limited time upon his lower mental
faculties, sexual selection tended to act if
at all prejudicially, through polygamy,
prostitution, and slavery, though it pos
sesses the potentiality of acting in the
future so as to ensure Intellectual and
Moral Progress, and thus elevate the race
to whatever degree of civilisation and well-
being it is capable of reaching in earth-life.

Eugenics, or Race Improvement through
Marriage

The total cessation of the action of
natural selection as a cause of improvement
in our race, either physical or mental, led
to the proposal of the late Sir F. Galton to
establish a new science, which he termed
Eugenics. A society has been formed, and
much is being written about checking
degeneration and elevating the race to a
higher level by its means. Sir F. Galton's
own proposals were limited to giving prizes
or endowments for the marriage of persons
of high character, both physical, mental,
and moral, to be determined by some form
of inquiry or examination. This may,
perhaps, not do much harm, but it would
certainly do very little good. Its range of

127

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

action would be extremely limited, and so
far as it induced any couples to marry
each other for the pecuniary reward, it
would be absolutely immoral in its nature,
and probably result in no perceptible
improvement of the race.

But there is great danger in such a
process of artificial selection by experts,
who would certainly soon adopt methods
very different from those of the founder.
We have already had proposals made for
the " segregation of the Feeble-Minded,"
while the " sterilization of the unfit " and
of some classes of criminals is already
being discussed. This might soon be ex
tended to the destruction of deformed
infants, as was actually proposed by the
late Grant Allen ; while ,Mr. Hiram M.
Stanley, in a work on Our Civilisation and
the Marriage Problem, proposed more
far-reaching measures. He says : " The
drunkard, the criminal, the diseased, the
morally weak, should never come into
society. Not reform, but prevention
should be the cry." And he hints at the
methods he would adopt, in the follow
ing passages : "In the true golden age,
which lies not behind but before us, the
privilege of parentage will be esteemed

128

Progress Through Selection

an honour for the comparatively few, and
no child will be born who is not only sound
in body and mind, but also above the
average as to natural ability and moral
force." And he concludes : " The most
important matter in society, the inherent
quality of the members of which it is
composed, should be regulated by trained
specialists/'

Of course, our modern eugenists will
disclaim any wish to adopt such measures
as are here hinted at, which are in every
way dangerous and detestable. But I
protest strenuously against any direct in
terference with the freedom of marriage,
which, as I shall show, is not only to
tally unnecessary, but would be a much
greater source of danger to morals and
to the well-being of humanity than the
mere temporary evils it seeks to cure.
I trust that all my readers will oppose
any legislation on this subject by a chance
body of elected persons who are totally
unfitted to deal with far less complex
problems than this one, and as to which
they are sure to bungle disastrously.

It is in the highest degree presump
tuous and irrational to attempt to deal by
compulsory enactments with the most vital

J 129

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

and most sacred of all human relations,
regardless of the fact that our present
phase of social development is not only
extremely imperfect, but, as I have al
ready shown, vicious and rotten at the
core. How can it be possible to deter
mine by legislation those relations of the
sexes which shall be best alike for indi
viduals and for the race, in a society in
which a large proportion of our women
are forced to work long hours daily for
the barest subsistence, with an almost
total absence of the rational pleasures of
life, for the want of which thousands are
driven into wholly uncongenial marriages
in order to secure some amount of per
sonal independence or physical well-being ?
Let anyone consider, on the one hand,
the lives of the wealthy as portrayed in
the society newspapers of the day, with
their endless round of pleasure and luxury,
their almost inconceivable wastefulness and
extravagance, indicated by the cost of
female dress and the fact of a thousand
pounds or more being expended on the
flowers for a single entertainment. On
the other hand, let him contemplate the
awful lives of millions of workers, so miser
ably paid and with such uncertainty of
130

Progress Through Selection

work that many thousands of the women
and young girls are driven on the streets
as the only means of breaking the monot
ony of their unceasing labour and obtain
ing some taste of the enjoyments of life
at whatever cost ; and then ask himself if
the Legislature which cannot remedy this
state of things should venture to meddle
with the great problems of marriage and
the sanctities of family life. Is it not
a hideous mockery that the successive
Governments which for forty years have
seen the people they profess to govern
so driven to despair by the vile conditions
of their existence that in an ever larger
and larger proportion they seek death by
suicide as their only means of escape — that
Governments which have done nothing
to put an end to this continuous horror of
starvation and suicide, should be thought
capable of remedying some of its more
terrible results, while leaving its causes
absolutely untouched ?

It is my firm conviction, for reasons
I shall give farther on, that, when we
have cleansed the Augean stable of our
present social organisation, and have made
such arrangements that all shall contri
bute their share either of physical or

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

mental labour, and that every one shall
obtain the full and equal reward for their
work, the future progress of the race will
be rendered certain by the fuller develop
ment of its higher nature acted on by a
special form of selection which will then
come into play.

When men and women are, for the
first time in the course of civilisation,
alike free to follow their best impulses ;
when idleness and vicious or hurtful luxury
on the one hand, oppressive labour and the
dread of starvation on the other, are alike
unknown ; when all receive the best and
broadest education that the state of civil
isation and knowledge will admit ; when
the standard of public opinion is set by
the wisest and the best among us, and
that standard is systematically inculcated
on the young ; thenj we shall find that
a system of truly natural selection will
come spontaneously into action which will
steadily tend to eliminate the lower, the
less developed, or in any way defective
types of men, and will thus continuously
raise the physical, moral, and intellectual
standard of the race. The exact mode in
which this selection will operate will now
be briefly explained.

132

xvi] Progress Through Selection

Free Selection in Marriage

It will be generally admitted that
although many women now remain un
married from necessity rather than from
choice, there are always considerable
numbers who feel no strong impulse to
marriage, and accept husbands to secure
subsistence and a home of their own
rather than from personal affection or
strong sexual emotion. In a state of
society in which all women were economic
ally independent, were all fully occupied
with public duties and social or intellec
tual pleasures, and had nothing to gain
by marriage as regards material well-
being or social position, it is highly prob
able that the numbers of the unmarried
from choice would increase. It would
probably come to be considered a degrada
tion for any woman to marry a man whom
she could not love and esteem, and this
reason would tend at least to delay
marriage till a worthy and sympathetic
partner was encountered.

In man, on the other hand, the passion
of love is more general and usually stronger ;
and in such a society as here postulated
there would be no way of gratifying this

133

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

passion but by marriage. Every woman,
therefore, would be likely to receive offers,
and a powerful selective agency would
rest with the female sex. Under the
system of education and public opinion
here supposed, there can be little doubt
how this selection would be exercised. The
idle or the utterly selfish would be almost
universally rejected ; the chronically dis
eased or the weak in intellect would also
usually remain unmarried, at least till
an advanced period of life ; while those
who showed any tendency to insanity
or exhibited any congenital deformity
would also be rejected by the younger
women, because it would be considered an
offence against society to be the means
of perpetuating any such diseases or
imperfections.

We must also take account of a special
factor, hitherto almost unnoticed, which
would tend to intensify the selection thus
exercised. It is a fact well known to
statisticians that although females are in
excess in almost all civilised popula
tions, yet this is not due to a law of
Nature ; for with us, and I believe in all
parts of the Continent, more males than
females are born to an amount of about
134

Progress Through Selection

3l to 4 per cent. But between the ages
of five and thirty-five there were, in 1910,
4*225 deaths of males from accident or
violence and only 1*300 of females, show
ing an excess of male deaths of 2*925 in
one year ; and for many years the num
bers of this class of deaths have not
varied much, the excess of preventable
deaths of males at those ages being very
nearly 3,000 annually. This excess is no
doubt due to boys and young men being
more exposed, both in play and work, to
various kinds of accidents than are women,
and this brings about the constant excess
of females in what may be termed normal
civilised populations.

In 1901 it was about a million ;
while fifty years earlier, when the popu
lation was about half, it was only
359,000, or considerably less than half
the present proportion. This is what
we should expect from the constant
increase of accidents and of emigration,
the effects of both of which fall most
upon males.

It appears, therefore, that the larger
number of women in our population to
day is not a natural phenomenon, but is
almost wholly the result of our own man-

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

made social environment. When the lives
of all our citizens are accounted of equal
value to the community, irrespective of
class or of wealth, a much smaller number
will be allowed to suffer from such pre
ventable causes ; while, as our colonies
fill up with a normal population, and the
enormous areas of uncultivated or half-
cultivated land at home are thrown open
to our own people on the most favourable
terms, the great tide of emigration will be
diminished and will then cease to affect
the proportion of the sexes. The result
of these various causes, now all tending to
increase the numbers of the female popu
lation, will, in a rational and just system
of society, of which we may hope soon
to see the commencement,' act in a con
trary direction, and will in a few genera
tions bring the sexes first to an equality,
and later on to a majority of males.

There are some, no doubt, who will
object that even when women have a free
choice, owing to improved economic con
ditions, they will not choose wisely so as
to advance the race. But no one has the
right to make such a statement without
adducing very strong evidence in support
of it. We have for generations degraded
136

Progress Through Selection

women in every possible way ; but we now
know that such degradation is not heredi
tary, and therefore not permanent. The great
philosopher and seer, Swedenborg, declared
that whereas men loved justice, wisdom
and power for their own sakes, women
loved them as seen in the characters of
men. It is generally admitted that there
is truth in this observation ; but there is
surely still more truth in the converse,
that they do not admire those men who are
palpably unjust, stupid, or weak, and still
less those who are distorted, diseased, or
grossly vicious, though under present con
ditions they are often driven to marry
them. It may be taken as certain, there
fore, that when women are economically and
socially free to choose, numbers of the worst
men among all classes who now readily ob
tain wives will be almost universally rejected.
Now, this mode of improvement by
elimination of the less desirable has many
advantages over that of securing early
marriages of the more admired ; for what
we most require is to improve the average
of our population by rejecting its lower types
rather than by raising the advanced types
a little higher. Great and good men are
always produced in sufficient numbers and
137

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

have always been so produced in every
phase of civilisation. We do not need
more of these so much as we want a
diminution of the weaker and less advanced
types. This weeding-out process has been
the method of natural selection, by which
the whole of the glorious vegetable and
animal kingdoms have been developed and
advanced. The survival of the fittest is
really the extinction of the unfit ; and it
is the one brilliant ray of hope for hu
manity that, just as we advance in the
reform of our present cruel and disastrous
social system, we shall set free a power of
selection in marriage that will steadily and
certainly improve the character, as well
as the strength and the beauty, of our
race.

Social Reform and Over-population

One of the most general and appar
ently the strongest of the objections to
any thorough schemes of social reform,
and especially to those that will abolish
want and the constant dread of starva
tion is that, in any society in which this
is done early marriages will be much
more numerous ; there will be no pruden
tial checks to large families ; and in a few

Progress Through Selection

generations, as Malthus argued, popula
tions will increase beyond the means of
subsistence. Then will commence a con
tinual decrease of well-being, culminating
in universal poverty, worse than any that
now exists, because it will be universal.
The following quotation from an eminent
American writer shows that this fear has
really been felt :

" If it be true that reason must direct the course
of human evolution, and if it be also true that selec
tion of the fittest is the only method available for
that purpose ; then, if we are to have any race-
improvement at all, the dreadful law of destruction
of the weak and helpless must, with Spartan firmness,
be carried out voluntarily and deliberately. Against
such a course all that is best in us revolts." *

A more recent writer, Dr. W. M.
Flinders Petrie, the well-known Egyptian
explorer, has put forward similar views in
a tentative manner, but clearly showing
what he thinks our present state of society
requires. Of the compensation to work
men for accident he says :

" The immediate effect upon character is to save
the careless, thoughtless, and incompetent from the
results of their faults ; this at once reduces largely

* Professor Joseph I<e Coute, in The Monist, Vol. I.,
P- 334-

139

Environment and Moral Progress CCH.

the weeding and educational effects of the bad
qualities."

And of old-age pensions his concluding
remark is :

" Nature knows of no right to maintenance, but
only the necessity of getting rid of these who need it
by mending or ending them."

Again, as to the huge waste of infant
life now going on, which he admits is
preventable and might be saved, he re
marks :

" We must agree that it would be of the lower,
or lowest type of careless, thriftless, dirty, and in
capable families that the increase would be obtained.
Is it worth while to dilute our increase of population
by 10 per cent, more of the more inferior kind ? "

And he concludes thus:

" This movement is doing away with one of the
few remains of natural wreeding out of the unfit that
our civilisation has left us. And it will certainly
cause more misery than happiness in the course of a
century." *

The whole book is full of such state
ments as the above, for which neither
facts nor arguments are given. It is
assumed throughout that the failures in
our modern society are so through their

* Janus in Modern Life. By W. M. Flinders Petrie,
D.C.I,., F.R.S.

140

Progress Through Selection

own fault — they are " wastrels " -- and
deserve neither pity nor help. He knows
nothing apparently of Dr. Barnardo's work
in rescuing these " wastrel " children from
the gutter and the workhouse, treating
them well and kindly, training them in
work, and sending many thousands to
Canada. A record of their subsequent life
was kept, and it was found that very few
failed to do well, while a very large majority
became valuable citizens in their new
home. On the whole, they were in no way
inferior to the average of emigrants who
go at their own expense, and who are
admitted to be among the best of our
workers.

None of the writers of the class here
quoted seem to have made themselves
acquainted with the researches of Herbert
Spencer, Sir F. Galton, and others, as to
the natural laws which determine the rate
of increase of population when those laws
are allowed to operate freely under rational
and moral social conditions. A short state
ment of these laws will therefore be given.

In a remarkable essay, first published
in 1852, H. Spencer, with his usual philo
sophical insight, examined the facts of
reproduction and population throughout

141

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

the whole of the animal kingdom, and
showed that the duration of the individual
life and the increase of the race varied
inversely, those groups which have the
simplest organisation and the shortest lives
producing the greatest number of off
spring ; in other terms, individuation and
reproduction are antagonistic. But indi
viduation depends almost entirely on the
development and specialisation of the ner
vous system, through which alone all
advance in instinct, emotion, and intel
lect is rendered possible. The actual rate
of increase in man has been determined by
the necessities of the savage state, in
which, as in most species of mammals, it
is usually what is just required to main
tain a limited average pbpulation. But
with a true advance in civilisation the
average duration of life increases, and the
possible increase of population under
favourable conditions becomes very great,
because fertility is greater than is needed
under the new conditions. At present,
however, no general advance in intellec
tuality has taken place ; but that the
facts do accord with the theory is indi
cated by the common observation that
highly intellectual parents do not have
142

Progress Through Selection

large families, while the most rapid in
crease occurs in those classes which are
engaged in healthy manual labour.

But a law founded on such a broad
physiological basis of observation is sure
to continue in action, and we may there
fore feel certain that as the intellectual
level of the whole race is raised by general
culture and physical health, the law of
diminishing fertility will act, and will tend
in the remote future to bring about an
exact balance between the rate of increase
and that of mortality.

A more immediate and effective check
to rapid increase of population will, how
ever, be brought about by the social
reforms already suggested. When poverty
is abolished and neither economic nor
social advantages will be gained by early
marriage, there can be no doubt it will be
generally deferred to a later age. Still more
effective will be the extension of the period
of education or training for the whole
population for several years longer than at
present, together with the growth of public
opinion against all marriages between per
sons who have not yet begun the serious
work of life. It would also be an essential
part of education to inculcate the delay of

143

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

marriage till every opportunity has been
afforded both of the parties concerned
of becoming thoroughly acquainted with
each other before undertaking so serious a
responsibility as marriage usually involves.

The effect of even a few years' delay of
marriage on population is very consider
able. Sir F. Gait on has shown from the
best statistics available that if we compare
women married at twenty with those at
twenty-nine, the comparative fertility is as
8 to 5. But this does not represent the whole
effect on increase of population. When mar
riage is delayed, the time between successive
generations is correspondingly increased ;
and yet another effect in the same direction
is produced by the fact that the greater the
average age of marriage the fewer genera
tions are alive at the same time, and it is
the combined effect of these three factors
that determines the actual increase of the
population due to this cause.

Sir F. Galton gives a remarkable table
showing this combined result of these
causes. He finds that if one hundred
mothers and their daughters in each suc
cessive generation marry at twenty, there
will be an increase of such mothers in each
successive generation of 1*15. If, how-

144

Progress Through Selection

ever, they marry at twenty-nine, each suc
cessive generation of mothers diminishes in
the proportion of 0-85. If this goes on for
108 years, the hundred mothers who marry
at twenty have increased to 175, and in 216
years to 299 ; while those who marry at
twenty-nine will have decreased to 61 and
38 respectively. It is therefore shown that
under present social conditions the age of
marriage necessary to preserve a station
ary population will be somewhere between
twenty and twenty-nine. The above figures
are, however, founded on special cases, and
the actual facts are so complicated by the
number of childless marriages, the rate of
infantile mortality and other causes, that
they must be taken only as establishing
a law of rather rapid decrease of fertility
with each year's addition to the average
age of marriage of the mother.

I have now, I venture to hope, estab
lished two important principles in relation
to human progress. In the first place, I
have shown that modern ideas as to the
necessity of dealing directly with some of
our glaring social evils, such as race
degeneration and the various forms of
sexual immorality, are fundamentally wrong

K 145

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

and are doomed to failure so long as their
fundamental causes — widespread poverty,
destitution, and starvation — are not greatly
diminished and ultimately abolished. I
have proved that human nature is not in
itself such a complete failure as our modern
eugenists seem to suppose, but that it is
influenced by fundamental laws which
under reasonably just and equal economic
conditions will automatically abolish all
these evils.

In the second place, I have shown that
the dread of over-population as the result
of the abolition of poverty is wholly and
utterly fallacious — a mere bugbear created
by ignorance of natural laws and of pre
sumption in thinking that we can cure
social evils while leaving the man-made
causes which produce them unaltered. The
three great natural laws which all our
would-be reformers ignore are : —

(1) That a very moderate advance in
the average age of marriage — which would
certainly result from a truly rational sys
tem of education combined with economic
equality — necessarily diminishes the rate
of increase of the population.

(2) That every approach to educational
and economic equality by effecting a large

146

Progress Through Selection

saving of the lives of males who now die
from preventable causes, combined with the
fact that male births exceed those of females,
would so diminish the number of the latter
that they would soon become less instead
of, as now, more than that of males : that
this would give them an effective choice in
marriage which they do not now possess,
together with the power of delay which for
many reasons large numbers of them would
exercise.

(3) The law of diminishing fertility with
increase of brain-work through education
and training would further tend to the
diminution of fertility.

These three natural causes all tend in
one direction — the equality of births with
deaths ; while their action would be so
readily modified by public opinion as to
obviate all danger of either increase or
decrease beyond what was necessary for
the well-being of each community, nation,
or race.

The Future Status of Woman

The foregoing statement of the effect
of established natural laws, if allowed free
play under rational conditions of civilisa
tion, clearly indicates that the position of

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

woman in the not distant future will be
far higher and more important than any
which has been claimed for or by her in
the past.

While she will be conceded full political
and social rights on an equality with man,
she will be placed in a position of respon
sibility and power which will render her
his superior, since the future moral pro
gress of the race will so largely depend
upon her free choice in marriage. As time
goes on, and she acquires more and more
economic independence, that alone will give
her an effective choice which she has never
had before. But this choice will be further
strengthened by the fact that, with ever-
increasing approach to equality of oppor
tunity for every child born in our country,
that terrible excess of male deaths, in boy
hood and early manhood especially, due to
various preventable causes, will disappear,
and change the present majority of women
to a majority of men. This will lead to a
greater rivalry for wives, and will give to
women the power of rejecting all the lower
types of character among their suitors.

It will be their special duty so to mould
public opinion, through home training and
social influence, as to render the women of
148

Progress Through Selection

the future the regenerators of the entire
human race. We hope and believe that
they will be fully equal to the high and
responsible position which, in accordance
with natural laws, they will be called upon
to fulfil.

The certainty that this powerful selec
tive agency will come into existence just
in proportion as we reform our existing
social system by the abolition of poverty
and the establishment of full equality of
opportunity in education and economic
position, demonstrates that Nature — or the
Universal Mind — has not failed or bungled
our world so completely as to require
the weak and ignorant efforts of the
eugenists to set it right, while leaving
the great fundamental causes of all exist
ing social evils absolutely untouched. Let
them devote all their energies to purify
ing this whitened sepulchre of destitution
and ignorance, and the beneficent laws of
human nature will themselves bring about
the physical, intellectual, and moral ad
vancement of our race.

149

CHAPTER XVII

HOW TO INITIATE AN ERA OF MORAL
PROGRESS

IN Chapters VIII to XII of this volume I
have given in briefest outline a summary
of the growth during the nineteenth cen
tury of the actual social environment in
the midst of which we live.

We see a continuous advance of man's
power to utilise the forces of Nature, to
an extent which surpasses everything he
had been able to do during all the pre
ceding centuries of his recorded history.

We also see that the result of this
vast economic revolution has been almost
wholly evil.

We see that this hundredfold increase
of wealth, amply sufficient to provide
necessaries, comforts, and all beneficial
refinements and luxuries for our whole
population, has been distributed with such
gross injustice that the actual condition
of those who produce all this wealth has
become worse and worse, no efficient

An Era of Moral Progress

arrangements having been made that from
the overflowing abundance produced all
should receive the mere essentials of a
healthy and happy existence.

We have seen huge cities grow up,
every one of them with their overcrowded,
insanitary slums, where men, women, and
children die prematurely as surely as
though a body of secret poisoners were
constantly at work to destroy them.

We see thousands of girls compelled by
starvation to work in such an empoisoned
environment as to produce horribly pain
ful and disfiguring disease, which is often
fatal in early youth, or in what ought to
have been, and what might have been,
the period of maximum enjoyment of
their womanhood. And to this very day
no efficient steps have been taken to
abolish these conditions.

We see millions still struggling in vain
for a sufficiency of the bare necessaries
of life (which in their misery is all they
ask), often culminating in actual starva
tion, or in suicide to which they are
driven by the dread of starvation.
Yet our Governments, selected from
among the most educated, the most
talented, the wealthiest of the country,

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

with absolute power to make what laws
and regulations they please, and an over
flowing fund of accumulated wealth to
draw upon, do nothing, although more
people die annually of want than are
killed in a great war, and more chil
dren than could be slaughtered by many
Herods.

And while all this goes on in the
depths, where —

" Pale anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair " —

a little higher up, among the middle-men
distributors of the necessaries and luxuries
of life, bribery, adulteration, and various
forms of petty dishonesty are rampant.

And higher yet, among the great
Capitalists, the merchant Princes, the Cap
tains of industry, we find hard task
masters who drive down wages below
the level of bare subsistence, and who
support a more gigantic and widespread
system of gambling than the world has
ever seen.

And, finally, our administration of
what we call " Justice " (and of which we
are so proud because our judges cannot
be bribed) is utterly unjust, because it

152

An Era of Moral Progress

is based on a system of money fees at
every step ; because it is so cumbrous
and full of technicalities as to need the
employment of attorneys and counsel at
great cost, and because all petty offences
are punishable by fine or imprisonment,
which makes poverty itself a crime while
it allows those with money to go prac
tically free.

Taking account of these various groups
of undoubted facts, many of which are so
gross, so terrible, that they cannot be over
stated, it is not too much to say that our
whole system of society is rotten from top
to bottom, and the Social Environment as a
whole, in relation to our possibilities and
our claims, is the worst that the world has
ever seen.

Such are the evil products of the social
environment we have ourselves created
in the course of a single century. We
have seen it going from bad to worse, and
have applied petty remedies here and there
during the whole period ; but the evils
have continued to increase. It has now
become clear to the more intelligent of
the workers that if we wish to improve it
—if we wish to prevent it from getting
even worse than it is — we must deal with

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

the root-causes of the evil and, so far as
possible, reverse the conditions which are
so demonstrably bad, such hideous failures.
And, fortunately, this is by no means so
difficult as it may seem to be, because a
large body of our thinkers and a consider
able number of our workers see clearly
what these root-causes are, and, less
clearly, how to remedy them. They will,
however, give their energetic support to
any Government that devotes itself to the
task of remedying them. The following
are my own views as to how the problem
must be attacked in order to solve it
thoroughly and permanently.

The Root-cause and the Remedy

If we review with care the long train
of social evils which have grown up dur
ing the nineteenth century, we shall find
that every one of them, however diverse
in their nature and results, is due to the
same general cause, which may be defined
or stated in a variety of different ways :

(i) They are due, broadly and gener
ally, to our living under a system of
universal competition for the means of
'54

An Era of Moral Progress

existence, the remedy for which is equally
universal co-operation.

(2) It may be also defined as a system
of economic antagonism, as of enemies,
the remedy being a system of economic
brotherhood, as of a great family, or of
friends.

(3) Our system is also one of monopoly
by a few of all the means of existence :
the land, without access to which no life
is possible ; and capital, or the results of
stored-up labour, which is now in the
possession of a limited number of capital
ists and therefore is also a monopoly.
The remedy is freedom of access to land
and capital for all.

(4) Also, it may be defined as social
injustice, inasmuch as the few in each
generation are allowed to inherit the
stored-up wealth of all preceding genera
tions, while the many inherit nothing.
The remedy is to adopt the principle of
equality of opportunity for all, or of uni
versal inheritance by the State in trust for
the whole Community.

These four statements of the existing
causes of all our social evils cannot, I
believe, be controverted, and the remedies
for them may be condensed into one

Environment and Moral Progress [CH.

general proposition : that it is the first
duty (in importance) of a civilised Govern
ment to organise the labour of the whole
community for the equal good of all ; but
it is also their first duty (in time) to take
immediate steps to abolish death by star
vation and by preventable disease due to
insanitary dwellings and dangerous em
ployments, while carefully elaborating the
permanent remedy for want in the midst
of wealth.

I myself have pointed out how these
two ends may be best achieved, and hope
to elaborate them. In the meantime, I
call attention to Mr. Standish O'Grady's
letter " To the Leaders of Labour" in The
New Age of November 2ist, 1912, in which,
after referring to the very natural dread by
the rich of any such radical reorganisation
of Society, as leading to their own financial
ruin (which it certainly need not do), he
makes the following suggestive statement,
with which I hope all my readers will agree :

" But what they fail to perceive is, that, in a
world like this, made by infinite goodness and wisdom,
Right is always the great stand-by for men and for
Nations, and for the rich as well as for the poor ;
and that Wrong, sooner or later, ends in misery and
destruction."

156

An Era of Moral Progress

That is sound moral teaching. We
have been doing the Wrong for the past
century, and we have reaped, and are
reaping, " misery and destruction." It is
time that we changed our methods, which
are all (as I think I have sufficiently
pointed out) fundamentally Wrong, radi
cally Unjust, wholly Immoral.

We have ourselves created an im
moral or unmoral Social Environment. To
undo its inevitable results we must re
verse our course. We must see that all
our economic legislation, all our social
reforms, are in the very opposite direction
to those hitherto adopted, and that they
tend in the direction of one or other of
the four fundamental remedies I have
suggested. In this way only can we hope
to change our existing immoral environ
ment into a moral one, and initiate a new
era of Moral Progress.

In Chapters XIII to XVI I have shown
that the well-established laws of Evolu
tion as they really apply to mankind are
all favourable to the advance of true
Civilisation and of Morality. Our exist
ing competitive and antagonistic Social
System alone neutralises their beneficent
157

Environment and Moral Progress

operation. That System must therefore
be radically changed into one of brotherly
co-operatiori and co-ordination for the
equal good of all. To succeed we must
make this principle our guide and our
pole star in all Social legislation.

Index

ACQUIRED characters, definition
of, 104

characters, on the heredity

of, 103

Adaptation, 106
Adulteration, 55
Alcoholism, deaths from, 67

in women, 68

statistics of, 68
America, Central, architecture

of. 34

Animals, natural selection
among, 75

Anthropological Review, 99

Apes, anthropoid, affinity with
man, 93

Aquatic forms of life, increase
. of, 85

Archimedes, 34

Australian aborigines, char
acter of, 33
and Caucasians, 34

BARNARDO, Dr., 141

Beaver, 95

Bimana, 94

Brah6, Tycho, 23

Brain as organ of the mind, 94

Bribery, 56

Browning's, Mrs., Cry of the

Children, 42
Buddha, 8

CAPITALISM, 152

Caucasians and Australian
aborigines, 34

Causes of economic evils, 154
Chambers's Vestiges of

Creation, 81
Character, definition of, 4

difficulty of knowing good
from bad, 5

mental faculties and, 5

morality based upon, 5

not cumulative, 37

of savage races, 32

permanence of, 8

public opinion and, 36

selective agency to improve,
36

subject to variation, 36

transmission of, 4, 7, 36

variability and, 82
Characters, acquired, definition
of, 104

acquired, heredity of, 103

innate, 104, no

heredity of, no
Chemical trades, evils of, 50
Child labour, evils of, 41, 43
Church, the work of the, 118
Civil law system, 62
Civilisation during i8th cen
tury, 40

evolution and, 157

of ancient Egypt, 15, 35

of ancient India, 8

of ancient Mesopotamia, 15
Civilisations, ancient, 112
Classical writers, our indebted
ness to, 115
Coal mines, accidents in, 43

child labour in, 43

female workers in, 43

159

Index

Coal mines, insecurity in, 43

who the, belong to, 45
Commercial system, immorality

of our, 55
Companies, Limited Liability,

56

Competition, 154
Conduct, character and, 5

environment and, 6
Confucius, 8
Cook, Captain, opinion of, on

natives of Friendly Isles,

32

Co-operation, 154, 160
Criminal law system, 64
Cruciferae family, increase of,

84

Curr, Mr., opinion of, on Aus
tralian aborigines, 33

Cutlery trade, evils of, 50

Daily Citizen quoted, 51, 52
Darwin and heredity, 103

and natural selection, 87,

93> i25

and transference of selection

to mind, 99
and-variability, 82
on Tahitians, 32
Darwin's Descent of Man, 93,

I25

Origin of Sfecies, 82
theory of Pan genesis, 104
Darwinism and Lamarckism,

78, 81

and variability, 82
objections to, 85, 90
(See also Evolution, Lam
arckism, Natural selection,
etc.)

Deadly trades, 50
Dell's, J. H., Dawning Grey

quoted, 117
Descent of Man, Darwin's, 93,

125

Divine influx into man, 92, 115,

119

Divorce, 74

Dutt, Mr. Romesh, quoted, 9
Dwellings, insanitary, 47

ECONOMIC advance, evils of, 150
antagonism, 155
brotherhood, 155
evils, causes of, 154
remedies for, 154
Education, effects of, not

hereditary, in, 114
extension of period of, 143
national system of, needed,

146

of the world, in
Egypt, astronomy in ancient,

18
civilisation of ancient, 15,

35

intellect in ancient, 16
Eighteenth century, stationary

epoch, 40, 122
Elephants, increase of, 85
Environment, laws of heredity

and, 103

modified by man, 95
not always responsible for

specialisation, 106
remedies, 154
social, and conduct, 6
social, character of, 153
social, during igth century

40
social, evils of, causes of,

J/54

Equality of opportunity, 155
Erman, Prof. Adolf, quoted, 26
Euclid, 34
Eugenics, methods of, 127

science of, established by

Sir F. Galton, 127
Eugenists, 149

Evil, origin of, problem of,
118

possible solution of, 119
Evolution, a rational theory, 81

acceptance of, 81

and civilisation, 157

Lamarckism and, 81

Chambers and, 81

Darwin and, 81

exposition of, by Spencer,
81

natural selection and, 77

objections to, 81, 90

160

Index

Evolution variability of species,
8, 82

(See also Darwinism,
Lamarckism, Natural
selection, etc.)

FACTORY system, development

of, 41
evils of, 41

Fertility, law of diminishing,
144, 147

Fines v. imprisonment, 65

Friendly Isles, natives of, char
acter of, 32

GALTON, SIR FRANCIS, 37

eugenic theory of, 127

on laws of increase of popu
lation, 127

Galvanising trade, evils of, 51
Gambling, immorality of, 59

in trade, 58

inconsistent attitude to, 59

Stock Exchange, 59
Genius, not cumulative, 37

not necessarily hereditary,

37 ; examples, 38
Gothic architecture, 34
Greece, 121

architecture of ancient, 34

HEREDITY ajid genius, 37

and "recession to medi
ocrity," 38

beneficence of law of, 115

Darwin and, 103

importance of subject, 103

Lamarck and, 104

laws of, and environment,
103

misconceptions regarding,
103

of innate characters, no
Herschel, Sir John, 82
Homer, 8
Hominidae, 94
Human nature, faculties of, 100

IMPRISONMENT v. fines, 6c;
India, architecture of ancient, 34
intelligence and morality in

ancient, 9, n, 15
religious conceptions in

ancient, n
ludividuation, 142
Infantile mortality, Prof.

Petrie on, 140
statistics of, 47, 72
Injustice, social, 155
Innate characters, 104

heredity of, no
Insanitary dwellings, 47
Intellect in ancient India, 9, n.

'5

permanence of, 15
Intellectual advance not
general, 142

JESUS CHRIST, 116
Justice, administration of, 62
immorality of, 66, 152

LAMARCK and evolution, 81

and heredity, 104
Lamarckism, 78, 89

and Darwinism, 78

insufficiency of, as a theory,

80

Land, access to, 155
Language, 28

diversity of, 120

lowest races possess, 31
Law, civil, system, 62

criminal, system, 64

partiality of the, 65
Layard, Sir H., 16
Le Coute, Prof., quoted, 139
Lead glaze trade, evils of, 50
Lead poisoning of workers, 51
Life-destroying trades, 47
Lyell's Principles of Geology
quoted, 78

161

MAHA-BHARATA, Indian epic,

quoted, 8
Malthus, 139

Index

Mammals, classification of,

94

Man, affinity of, with anthro
poid apes, 93
and marriage, 133
dignity of, 91
Divine influx into, 92, 115,

119
external differences between,

and apes, 93
modifies his environment,

95

moral sense in, 91

nature of, stationary, 102

position of, 91

predominance of mind in,
98

preparation of, for pro
gress, 1 20

selection transferred to mind
in, 99

three great races of, 100

triumph of, over Nature,

.95, i5<>
Marriage, 143

freedom of, insisted upon,

128

man and, 133
women and, 133
Mental faculties in formation

of character, 5
Mesopotamia, civilisation of

ancient, 15
Mind, brain the organ of the,

94
predominance of, in man,

98
selection transferred to, in

man, 99

Monier-Williams, Sir M., n
Monopoly, 155
Moral degradation, indications

of, 67

progress, definition of, i
progress, initiating new era

of, 150
progress through new form

of selection, 125
sense in man, 91
Morality amongst the ancients,
8

Morality based upon character,

based upon human nature,

4

evolution and, 157
in ancient India, 9
no definite advance in, 36
product of environment, 3
savages and, 31
standards of, varying, 2
Morals, definition of, i

NATURAL selection, among ani
mals, 75

and evolution, 77
and origin of species, 82
explanation of, 75, 87
modification of, by man, 96,

99

modified by mind, 93

new form of, 125

process of, 112

two modes of, 125
Nineteenth century, environ
ment during, 40

movements during, 122

reaction against forced
civilisation during, 41

O'GRADY, MR. S., quoted, 156
Oliver's, Sir T., Diseases of

Occupation, 53
Organic nature, development

of, 109

indivisibility of, 109
Origin of Species, Darwin's,

essential features of, 82
Origin of species, natural

selection essential factor

in, 82

Overcrowding, statistics of, 48
Owen, Sir Richard, and man's

affinity with apes, 94

Pall Mall Gazette, reply to, 76
Pangenesis, theory of, 104
Park, Mungo, 101
Petrie, Prof., quoted, 139

162

Index

Plato, 8, 116

Poor Law, immorality of the,

65
Population, increase of, laws

governing, 141
social reform and, 138
Poverty, 130, 143, 151
Polynesian races, character of,

Preventable deaths, responsi
bility for, 43
Primates, 94

Proctor, Mr. R. A., quoted, 18

Progress, moral, definition of, i

moral, how to initiate era

of, 150
moral, through new form of

selection, 125
Prostitution, 73

Pyramid of Gizeh as observa
tory, 23
pu- pose of, 17
structure of, 19

QUADRUMANA, 94

RAWLINSON, 16

Reade's, Martyrdom of Man,

I13

" Recession to mediocrity," here
dity and, 38

Religious conceptions in ancient
India, n

Remedies for economic evils,

iS4 .

Reproduction, 142

Rich, dread of, to social reor
ganisation, 156

Rome, 121

SAVAGE races, morality of, 31
Selection, artificial, 105, 127

free, in marriage, 133
Selection, natural, action of,
transferred to mind in
man, 99
amongst animals, 75

'63

Selection, natural, and origin

of species, 82
explanation of, 75, 87
modification of, by man, 96,

modified by mind, 93
process of, 112
two modes of, 125
Selection, new form of, 125

sexual, 125
Selective agency to improve

character, 36

Sherard's, 'Mr. R. H., White
Slaves of England, 51
(note)

Slavery, 2, 115
Slums, 47, 151

Smyth, Piazzi, on Pyramids, 18
Snowden, Philip, 53
Social environment and conduct,

6

character of, 153
during igth century, 40
evils of, causes and remedies

°f> 154
reorganisation, the rich

and, 156

reform, 143 ; and over
population, 138
Socrates, 8
Species, increase of, 82, 84

origin of, natural selection,

and, 82

variability of, 82
Speech as proof of intelligence,

28

lowest races possess, 31
origin and development of,

29

Spencer, Herbert, 89, 99, 103
exposition of evolutionary

argument by, 81
on laws of increase of popu
lation, 141

Stanley, Hiram M., quoted, 128
Struggle for existence, 85, 86
Suicide, statistics of, 70
Survival of the fittest, 85, 87,

?39

" Survival value," 39
Swedenborg, 137

Index

TAHITIANS, character of, 32
Tinning trade, evils of, 51

UNHEALTHY trades, 50
Universe, development and pur
pose of, 119

VARIABILITY, character and, 36

basic law of nature, 96

explanation of, 82

of species, 82

purpose of, 90
Vedas, quoted, n

WAR, 74

Wealth, increase of, 41, 150
Webb, Mr. Sidney, quoted, 65
Women and marriage, 133

excess in numbers of, 134,

«47

future status of, 147
in trade, 151
Workmen's compensation, Prof.

Petrie on, 139

Writing as proof of intelli
gence, 28

origin and development of,
29

ZOOPHYTES, 95
Zymotic diseases, 47

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