of what the leisure class costs it, society might go into the market and secure services equal in worth to the services it receives from them. The feudal king obtained a district military captain by bestowing a fief; the modern state gains an educated army officer for a small fraction of the cost of a fief. Was chivalry, after all, "a cheap defense of nations," as Burke insisted? A few castles of the Middle Ages harbored men of letters and learning; but to-day, if society wants a scholar, it does not leave him, to seek a noble patron; it creates a professorship. In relieving distress, society no longer waits for Lady Bountiful; it calls in the retired doer or hires a trained social worker. From her nobles Europe has received much valuable public service for which she never paid, while America has paid her officeholders for much public service she never received. Still, the Europeans have paid infinitely more than the Americans for such service. We now see that to have faithful, high-minded public servants you do not need to maintain a landed aristocracy; what you have to do is to open attractive careers for trained men. In a word, the hereditary leisured have never rendered society a service which cannot now be had on far better terms from salaried, qualified workers. Private property is a social-welfare institution because the hope of acquiring property powerfully stimulates the economic activities of the capable. But when accumulations are so handed on as to create generations of drones and butterflies, they are not a blower but a damper. Hence, just as inheritable functions, offices, and privileges have been abolished with good results, inheritable great fortunes will be made impossible. Not that a son may not inherit enough of his father's wealth to live on, but that no one may inherit a fortune so large as to kill in him all incentive to work and to tempt him into an extravagance of expenditure and conduct which discourages or corrupts the useful members of society. CHAP. Paid Pub lic Service Is Cheap Long Run est in the CHAP. Differences between Natural Selection and Social Selection OCIAL SOCIA CHAPTER XXXI SELECTION IAL processes and institutions in some measure react upon and modify a people by checking the increase of certain types or stimulating the increase of other types. Such "social selection" is not to be confounded with the "natural selection " stressed by Darwin. We see the latter in the differential death rates caused by climate; by germ diseases which attack non-resistant stocks; by diseases which strike down the inferior in physique; by the accidents of life and the hazards of occupations which snatch away the reckless; by vice which purges from the ranks those fierce of appetite and weak of will. While Nature thus eliminates the unfit, society eliminates the misfit. Nature rejects the ill-constituted, the badly made; society preserves them but may burn the heretic and hang the criminal. For the most part, however, institutions determine not who shall live, but who shall leave progeny. They select not survivors, but parents. If society moulds the race, it does so chiefly by influencing one or more of the following factors: (a) the inclination to marry; (b) amount of marriage — polygamy, monogamy, etc.; (c) the age of marriage; (d) the will to have children; (e) the ability to rear children to maturity. Society thus discriminates between types on the basis of their volitions, whereas Nature discriminates for the most part on the basis of their bodily traits or their instincts. To tell how in the past society has moulded the race would be too great a task. All that can be attempted here is to consider the selective aspect of certain features of contemporary society. WAR Early hand-to-hand combat was a searching test of quality and favored the survival of the bravest, strongest and most adroit. Modern war, however, calls into the danger zone the pick of the young men, leaving the physical and mental culls to stay at CHAP. XXXI Modern home and propagate. Now that we destroy our enemies by lethal machinery, battle no longer spares unusual prowess as it often. did in the days of individual combat, but mows men down in- warfare discriminately. Beyond all question the World War caused a Promisvaster destruction of the superior and entails a graver decline in struction innate human quality than any happening in all previous Physically history of man. cuous De of the Superior Victory in No Proof Superi ority The Teutonic doctrine that war is an inter-group test of fitness to survive is a superstition befitting Central Africa. No Warfare doubt race quality is one factor in deciding which side wins. of Racial But when one considers the weight of other factors such as comparative size of the belligerent peoples, their natural defenses, their access to the highways of commerce, their mineral resources, their stage of industrial development, their training in technique, their degree of specialization upon warfare, and the like, the assumption that the victors in modern warfare are a "superior " breed, while the vanquished are an "inferior" breed, is worthier of gorillas than of rational beings. OBLIGATORY CELIBACY Sacerdotal Celibacy a the Race A priesthood like that of the Roman Catholic Church is in point of intellectual and moral endowment much superior to the gen- Loss to eral population from which it is drawn. Its celibacy therefore causes a superior current of heredity to be lost to the race. How serious this loss is may be gauged by showing what science and letters would have missed had the Protestant churches followed the Catholic church in requiring sacerdotal celibacy. Agassiz, Berzelius, Encke, Euler, Jenner, Linnaeus, Emerson, Hallam, Hobbes, Addison, Ben Jonson, Lessing, Richter, Swift, Thomson, Wieland, and Wren, as well as a host of lesser stars, were sons of Protestant clergymen. cal Cell In the United States, education is served by more than half Pedagogia million women school teachers who in point of native ability bacy and character belong probably in the superior fourth of the the population. The school board policy of employing only unmar- Superior ried women and of discharging them, no matter how efficient, if they marry, enforces a pedagogical celibacy which may perhaps be good for education but cannot be good for the race. The courts should uphold the woman teacher's right to marry and bear children without forfeiture of position. On eugenic CHAP. Not all Are Mistaken ism The Banishing of Alcohol, Disease and Slums Checks the Elimi nation of Degener ates grounds preference should be given the married rather than the single teachers, there should be many half-time positions enabling a teacher to be at the same time wife and mother and there should be no talk of a "moral obligation" of normal school graduates to teach when they prefer to marry. CHARITY The theory that the poor are simply the "unfit" cannot be accepted, nor yet the opposite theory that poverty is essentially a malignant ulcer which attacks and breaks down adjacent social tissue, sound and unsound alike. It is necessary to discriminate among the dependent. There are "God's poor" but then, too, there are "the devil's poor." The wise and benevolent seek out and relieve the former. The medieval doctrine that almsgiving is virtuous and will have its reward, no matter what its effects may be, has been discredited for a century. What we have learned as to the part played by indiscriminate charity in perpetuating degenerate stocks makes us afraid to give money with our eyes shut. In the valley of Aosta in Northern Italy, 'and in other Alpine regions, once was rife the form of idiocy known as cretinism, which is associated with goitre. Thanks to a mistaken charity this type was aided to mate and propagate until a horrible special variety of human beings had come into existence. Happily in recent years these unfortunates are no longer permitted to marry and breed, so that the type has nearly vanished. 1 "Distinctive conditions like misery, disease, and vice, though their action is largely indiscriminate, nevertheless attack degenerate stocks with special virulence and have some tendency to diminish them relatively to those that are sounder." This will not deter the social-minded from doing their best to exterminate these cankers, for they realize that "gangrene is not the best caustic." But if they banish alcohol, conquer the poverty dis eases, kill the infections spread by sex looseness, and abolish the slums, shacks and dumps which the degenerate haunt, they have removed certain natural filters from the human current. Unless other selective agencies are substituted the good-for-nothing live longer and rear more children than formerly. It follows that as we succeed in ridding society of misery, 1 Cooley, "Social Process," p. 230. CHAP. They Must Be Fil tered Out disease, and vice we should install artificial filters to intercept degenerate types. Such filters are: The custodial care or sterilization of the feeble-minded; relief of the chronic-pauper type only on terms which exclude their further increase; social pres- of the Popsure to deter persons with transmissible bodily defect from ulation by propagation; and the forcing of minimal standards of cleanli- Means ness, decency, child care and schooling upon those congenital incompetents who are able to maintain themselves just above the line of self-support. THE INHERITANCE OF PROPERTY Other Wealthy itance of The inheritance of wealth by the children of the rich exempts In them from the common lot of having to "make good" and Families enables some to propagate who would have left no progeny had the Inber they been allowed to find their natural level. An inherited for- Property tune is a life belt holding up the individual who lacks ordinary Eliminacapacity to keep himself afloat by his own efforts. Checks the tion of Degenerates Up to a Certain Transmis Is Eugenic This is not, however, to decry the inheritance of property. In any social order worthy of respect success in accumulation ought to be a prima facie evidence of uncommon ability. The legal right of such men to leave to their children property enough to help them rear their families would therefore appear to be eugenic in tendency. On the other hand, an inheritance which virtually endows the son for life relieves him from the necessity of doing anything and tempts him into idleness and self-indulgence. This is bad for the family stock as well as for society. The influence of the rich as a class upon the fate of other elements is bad. In a democratic age, when the power and the will to rise in the social scale have become general, the example Families of those buoyed up by inherited wealth has a pernicious effect upon the fecundity of the capable. The luxurious style of living developed in this class bedazzles many of the able and ambitious and they exert themselves to live up to extravagant standards. of consumption. To do this on their limited income obliges them to keep the family small. It The Capable Have Small in Order to Live ''Decent" ter That the Gifted Should Be Happy the society in which the gifted or the achievers con- It Is Betstitute the apex, for achievement is no enemy of progeny. is bad, however, when the rich are the topmost class, for their valuation of everything and every body in terms of money acts as a sterilizing poison on the rising business and professional the Pace Setting Class |