Social Environment and Moral Progress

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 consisting 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 selection another mode of rivalry by the display 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 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 offspring 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 display 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 æsthetic 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 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 possesses 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.

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 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 extended 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 following passages: "In the true golden age, which lies not behind but before us, the privilege of parentage will be esteemed 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 interference with the freedom of marriage, which, as I shall show, is not only totally 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 presumptuous and irrational to attempt to deal by compulsory enactments with the most vital 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 already shown, vicious and rotten at the core. How can it be possible to determine by legislation those relations of the sexes which shall be best alike for individuals 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 personal 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 miserably paid and with such uncertainty of work that many thousands of the women and young girls are driven on the streets as the only means of breaking the monotony of their unceasing labour and obtaining 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 contribute their share either of physical or 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 development 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 civilisation 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; then 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.

It will be generally admitted that although many women now remain unmarried 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 economically independent, were all fully occupied with public duties and social or intellectual pleasures, and had nothing to gain by marriage as regards material well-being or social position, it is highly probable that the numbers of the unmarried from choice would increase. It would probably come to be considered a degradation 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 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 diseased 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 populations, 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 3½ 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, showing an excess of male deaths of 2·925 in one year; and for many years the numbers 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 population 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-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 preventable 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 population, will, in a rational and just system of society, of which we may hope soon to see the commencement, act in a contrary direction, and will in a few generations 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 conditions, 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 women in every possible way; but we now know that such degradation is not hereditary, 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 conditions they are often driven to marry them. It may be taken as certain, therefore, that when women are economically and socially free to choose, numbers of the worst men among all classes who now readily obtain 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 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 humanity 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.

One of the most general and apparently 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 starvation is that, in any society in which this is done early marriages will be much more numerous; there will be no prudential checks to large families; and in a few generations, as Malthus argued, populations will increase beyond the means of subsistence. Then will commence a continual 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 selection 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."7

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 workmen 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 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 remarks:

"We must agree that it would be of the lower, or lowest type of careless, thriftless, dirty, and incapable 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 weeding 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."8

The whole book is full of such statements 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 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 statement of these laws will therefore be given.