mistrust we are apt to feel of the guidance of the spiritual sense,
on account of its proved readiness to accept illusions as realities,
warn us against deductive theories of conduct. Putting these, then,
at least for the moment, to one side, we find ourselves face to face
with two great and indisputable facts that everywhere force
themselves on the attention and compel consideration. The one is
that the whole of the living world moves steadily and continuously
towards the evolution of races that are progressively more and more
adapted to their complicated mutual needs and to their external
circumstances. The other is that the process of evolution has been
hitherto apparently carried out with, what we should reckon in our
ways of carrying out projects, great waste of opportunity and of life,
and with little if any consideration for individual mischance.
Measured by our criterion of intelligence and mercy, which consists
in the achievement of result without waste of time or opportunity,
without unnecessary pain, and with equitable allowance for pure
mistake, the process of evolution on this earth, so far as we can
judge, has been carried out neither with intelligence nor ruth, but
entirely through the routine of various sequences, commonly called
"laws," established or necessitated we know not how.
An incalculable amount of lower life has been certainly passed
through before that human organisation was attained, of which we and
our generation are for the time the holders and transmitters. This
is no mean heritage, and I think it should be considered as a sacred
trust, for, together with man, intelligence of a sufficiently high
order to produce great results appears, so far as we can infer from
the varied records of the prehistoric past, to have first dawned upon
the tenantry of the earth. Man has already shown his large power in
the modifications he has made on the surface of the globe, and in
the distribution of plants and animals. He has cleared such vast
regions of forest that his work that way in North America alone,
during the past half century, would be visable to an observer as far
off as the moon. He has dug and drained; he has exterminated plants
and animals that were mischievous to him; he has domesticated those
that serve his purpose, and transplanted them to great distances
from their native places. Now that this new animal man, finds
himself somehow in existence, endowed with a little power and
intelligence, he ought, I submit, to awake to a fuller knowledge of
his relatively great position, and begin to assume a deliberate part
in furthering the great work of evolution. He may infer the course
it is bound to pursue, from his observation of that which it has
already followed, and he might devote his modicum of power,
intelligence, and kindly feeling to render its future progress less
slow and painful. Man has already furthered evolution very
considerably, half unconsciously, and for his own personal advantages,
but he has not yet risen to the conviction that it is his religious
duty to do so deliberately and systematically.
SELECTION AND RACE.
The fact of an individual being naturally gifted with high qualities,
may be due either to his being an exceptionally good specimen of a
poor race, or an average specimen of a high one. The difference of
origin would betray itself in his descendants; they would revert
towards the typical centre of their race, deteriorating in the first
case but not in the second. The two cases, though theoretically
distinct, are confused in reality, owing to the frequency with which
exceptional personal qualities connote the departure of the entire
nature of the individual from his ancestral type, and the formation
of a new strain having its own typical centre. It is hardly
necessary to add that it is in this indirect way that natural
selection improves a race. The two events of selection and
difference of race ought, however, to be carefully distinguished in
broad practical considerations, while the frequency of their
concurrence is borne in mind and allowed for.
So long as the race remains radically the same, the stringent
selection of the best specimens to rear and breed from, can never
lead to any permanent result. The attempt to raise the standard of
such a race is like the labour of Sisyphus in rolling his stone
uphill; let the effort be relaxed for a moment, and the stone will
roll back. Whenever a new typical centre appears, it is as though
there was a facet upon the lower surface of the stone, on which it
is capable of resting without rolling back. It affords a temporary
sticking-point in the forward progress of evolution. The causes that
check the unlimited improvement of highly-bred animals, so long as
the race remains unchanged, are many and absolute.
In the first place there is an increasing delicacy of constitution;
the growing fineness of limb and structure end, after a few
generations, in fragility. Overbred animals have little stamina;
they resemble in this respect the "weedy" colts so often reared from
first-class racers. One can perhaps see in a general way why this
should be so. Each individual is the outcome of a vast number of
organic elements of the most various species, just as some nation
might be the outcome of a vast number of castes of individuals, each
caste monopolising a special pursuit. Banish a number of the humbler
castes--the bakers, the bricklayers, and the smiths, and the nation
would soon come to grief. This is what is done in high breeding;
certain qualities are bred for, and the rest are diminished as far
as possible, but they cannot be dispensed with entirely.
The next difficulty lies in the diminished fertility of highly-bred
animals. It is not improbable that its cause is of the same
character as that of the delicacy of their constitution. Together
with infertility is combined some degree of sexual indifference, or
when passion is shown, it is not unfrequently for some specimen of a
coarser type. This is certainly the case with horses and with dogs.
It will be easily understood that these difficulties, which are so
formidable in the case of plants and animals, which we can mate as
we please and destroy when we please, would make the maintenance of
a highly-selected breed of men an impossibility.
Whenever a low race is preserved under conditions of life that exact
a high level of efficiency, it must be subjected to rigorous
selection. The few best specimens of that race can alone be allowed
to become parents, and not many of their descendants can be allowed
to live. On the other hand, if a higher race be substituted for the
low one, all this terrible misery disappears. The most merciful form
of what I ventured to call "eugenics" would consist in watching for
the indications of superior strains or races, and in so favouring
them that their progeny shall outnumber and gradually replace that
of the old one. Such strains are of no infrequent occurrence. It is
easy to specify families who are characterised by strong resemblances,
and whose features and character are usually prepotent over those of
their wives or husbands in their joint offspring, and who are at the
same time as prolific as the average of their class. These strains
can be conveniently studied in the families of exiles, which, for
obvious reasons, are easy to trace in their various branches.
The debt that most countries owe to the race of men whom they
received from one another as immigrants, whether leaving their
native country of their own free will, or as exiles on political or
religious grounds, has been often pointed out, and may, I think, be
accounted for as follows:--The fact of a man leaving his compatriots,
or so irritating them that they compel him to go, is fair evidence
that either he or they, or both, feel that his character is alien to
theirs. Exiles are also on the whole men of considerable force of
character; a quiet man would endure and succumb, he would not have
energy to transplant himself or to become so conspicuous as to be an
object of general attack. We may justly infer from this, that exiles
are on the whole men of exceptional and energetic natures, and it is
especially from such men as these that new strains of race are likely
to proceed.
INFLUENCE OF MAN UPON RACE.
The influence of man upon the nature of his own race has already
been very large, but it has not been intelligently directed, and has
in many instances done great harm. Its action has been by invasions
and migration of races, by war and massacre, by wholesale
deportation of population, by emigration, and by many social customs
which have a silent but widespread effect.
There exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable,
against the gradual extinction of an inferior race. It rests on some
confusion between the race and the individual, as if the destruction
of a race was equivalent to the destruction of a large number of men.
It is nothing of the kind when the process of extinction works
silently and slowly through the earlier marriage of members of the
superior race, through their greater vitality under equal stress,
through their better chances of getting a livelihood, or through
their prepotency in mixed marriages. That the members of an inferior
class should dislike being elbowed out of the way is another matter;
but it may be somewhat brutally argued that whenever two individuals
struggle for a single place, one must yield, and that there will be
no more unhappiness on the whole, if the inferior yield to the
superior than conversely, whereas the world will be permanently
enriched by the success of the superior. The conditions of happiness
are, however, too complex to be disposed of by _à priori_ argument;
it is safest to appeal to observation. I think it could be easily
shown that when the differences between the races is not so great as
to divide them into obviously different classes, and where their
language, education, and general interests are the same, the
substitution may take place gradually without any unhappiness. Thus
the movements of commerce have introduced fresh and vigorous blood
into various parts of England: the new-comers have intermarried with
the residents, and their characteristics have been prepotent in the
descendants of the mixed marriages. I have referred in the earlier
part of the book to the changes of type in the English nature that
have occurred during the last few hundred years. These have been
effected so silently that we only know of them by the results.
One of the most misleading of words is that of "aborigines." Its use
dates from the time when the cosmogony was thought to be young and
life to be of very recent appearance. Its usual meaning seems to be
derived from the supposition that nations disseminated themselves
like colonists from a common centre about four thousand years, say
120 generations ago, and thenceforward occupied their lands
undisturbed until the very recent historic period with which the
narrator deals, when some invading host drove out the "aborigines."
This idyllic view of the march of events is contradicted by ancient
sepulchral remains, by language, and by the habits of those modern
barbarians whose history we know. There are probably hardly any
spots on the earth that have not, within the last few thousand years,
been tenanted by very different races; none hardly that have not
been tenanted by very different tribes having the character of at
least sub-races.
The absence of a criterion to distinguish between races and sub-races,
and our ethnological ignorance generally, makes it impossible to
offer more than a very off-hand estimate of the average variety of
races in the different countries of the world. I have, however,
endeavoured to form one, which I give with much hesitation, knowing
how very little it is worth. I registered the usually recognised
races inhabiting each of upwards of twenty countries, and who at the
same time formed at least half per cent of the population. It was, I
am perfectly aware, a very rough proceeding, so rough that for the
United Kingdom I ignored the prehistoric types and accepted only the
three headings of British, Low Dutch, and Norman-French. Again, as
regards India I registered as follows:--Forest tribes (numerous),
Dravidian (three principal divisions), Early Arian, Tartar (numerous,
including Afghans), Arab, and lastly European, on account of their
political importance, notwithstanding the fewness of their numbers.
Proceeding in this off-hand way, and after considering the results,
the broad conclusion to which I arrived was that on the average at
least three different recognised races were to be found in every
moderately-sized district on the earth's surface. The materials were
far too scanty to enable any idea to be formed of the rate of change
in the relative numbers of the constituent races in each country,
and still less to estimate the secular changes of type in those races.
It may be well to take one or two examples of intermixture. Spain
was occupied in the earliest historic times by at least two races,
of whom we know very little; it was afterwards colonised here and
there by Phoenicians in its southern ports, and by Greeks in its
eastern. In the third century B.C. it was invaded by the
Carthaginians, who conquered and held a large part of it, but were
afterwards supplanted by the Romans, who ruled it more or less
completely for 700 years. It was invaded in the fifth century A.D.
by a succession of German tribes, and was finally completely overrun
by the Visigoths, who ruled it for more than 200 years. Then came
the invasion of the Moors, who rapidly conquered the whole of the
Peninsula up to the mountains of Asturias, where the Goths still held
their own, and whence they issued from time to time and ultimately
recovered the country. The present population consists of the
remnants of one or more tribes of ancient Iberians, of the still
more ancient Basques, and of relics of all the invaders who have
just been named. There is, besides, a notable proportion of Gypsies
and not a few Jews.
This is obviously a most heterogeneous mixture, but to fully
appreciate the diversity of its origin the several elements should
be traced farther back towards their sources. Thus, the Moors are
principally descendants of Arabs, who flooded the northern provinces
of Africa in successive waves of emigration eastwards, both before
and after the Hegira, partly combining with the Berbers as they went,
and partly displacing them from the littoral districts and driving
them to the oases of the Sahara, whence they in their turn displaced
the Negro population, whom they drove down to the Soudan. The Gypsies,
according to Sir Henry Rawlinson,[16] came from the Indo-Scythic
tribes who inhabited the mouths of the Indus, and began to migrate
northward, from the fourth century onward. They settled in the
Chaldean marshes, assumed independence and defied the caliph. In A.D.
831 the grandson of Haroun al-Raschid sent a large expedition
against them, which, after slaughtering ten thousand, deported the
whole of the remainder first to Baghdad and thence onwards to Persia.
They continued unmanageable in their new home, and were finally
transplanted to the Cilician frontier in Asia Minor, and established
there as a military colony to guard the passes of the Taurus. In A.D.
962 the Greeks, having obtained some temporary successes, drove the
Gypsies back more into the interior, whence they gradually moved
towards the Hellespont under the pressure of the advancing Seljukians,
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They then crossed over
to Europe and gradually overspread it, where they are now estimated
to number more than three millions.
[Footnote 16: _Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society_, vol.
i. This account of the routes of the Gypsies is by no means
universally accepted, nor, indeed, was offered as a complete
solution of the problem of their migration, but it will serve to
show how complex that problem is.]
It must not be supposed that emigration on a large scale implies
even a moderate degree of civilisation among those who emigrate,
because the process has been frequently traced among the more
barbarous tribes, to say nothing of the evidence largely derived
from ancient burial-places. My own impression of the races in South
Africa was one of a continual state of ferment and change, of the
rapid development of some clan here and of the complete or almost
complete suppression of another clan there. The well-known history
of the rise of the Zulus and the destruction of their neighbours is
a case in point. In the country with which I myself was familiar the
changes had been numerous and rapid in the preceding few years, and
there were undoubted signs of much more important substitutions of
race in bygone times. The facts were briefly these: Damara Land was
inhabited by pastoral tribes of the brown Bantu race who were in
continual war with various alternations of fortune, and the several
tribes had special characteristics that were readily appreciated by
themselves. On the tops of the escarped hills lived a fugitive black
people speaking a vile dialect of Hottentot, and families of yellow
Bushmen were found in the lowlands wherever the country was unsuited
for the pastoral Damaras. Lastly, the steadily encroaching Namaquas,
a superior Hottentot race, lived on the edge of the district. They
had very much more civilisation than the Bushmen, and more than the
Damaras, and they contained a large infusion of Dutch blood.
The interpretation of all this was obviously that the land had been
tenanted a long time ago by Negroes, that an invasion of Bushmen
drove the Negroes to the hills, and that the supremacy of these
lasted so long that the Negroes lost their own language and acquired
that of the Bushmen. Then an invasion of a tribe of Bantu race
supplanted the Bushmen, and the Bantus, after endless struggles among
themselves, were being pushed aside at the time I visited them by
the incoming Namaquas, who themselves are a mixed race. This is
merely a sample of Africa; everywhere there are evidences of
changing races.
The last 300 or 400 years, say the last ten generations of mankind,
have witnessed changes of population on the largest scale, by the
extension of races long resident in Europe to the temperate regions
of Asia, Africa, America, and Australasia.
Siberia was barely known to the Russians of nine generations ago,
but since that time it has been continuously overspread by their
colonists, soldiers, political exiles, and transported criminals;
already some two-thirds of its population are Sclaves.
In South Africa the settlement at the Cape of Good Hope is barely
six generations old, yet during that time a curious and continuous
series of changes has taken place, resulting in the substitution of
an alien population for the Hottentots in the south and the Bantus
in the north. One-third of it is white, consisting of Dutch, English,
descendants of French Huguenot refugees, some Germans and Portuguese,
and the remainder is a strange medley of Hottentot, Bantu, Malay,
and Negro elements. In North Africa Egypt has become infiltrated
with Greeks, Italians, Frenchmen, and Englishmen during the last two
generations, and Algeria with Frenchmen.
In North America the change has been most striking, from a sparse
Indian population of hunters into that of the present inhabitants of
the United States and Canada; the former of these, with its total of
fifty millions inhabitants, already contains more than forty-three
millions of whites, chiefly of English origin; that is more of
European blood than is to be found in any one of the five great
European kingdoms of England, France, Italy, Germany, and Austria,
and less than that of Russia alone. The remainder are chiefly black,
the descendants of slaves imported from Africa. In the Dominion of
Canada, with its much smaller population of four millions, there has
been a less, but still a complete, swamping of the previous Indian
element by incoming whites.
In South America, and thence upwards to Mexico inclusive, the
population has been infiltrated in some parts and transformed in
others, by Spanish blood and by that of the Negroes whom they
introduced, so that not one half of its population can be reckoned
as of pure Indian descent. The West Indian Islands have had their
population absolutely swept away since the time of the Spanish
Conquest, except in a few rare instances, and African Negroes have
been substituted for them.
Australia and New Zealand tell much the same tale as Canada. A
native population has been almost extinguished in the former and is
swamped in the latter, under the pressure of an immigrant population
of Europeans, which is now twelve times as numerous as the Maories.
The time during which this great change has been effected is less
than that covered by three generations.
To this brief sketch of changes of population in very recent periods,
I might add the wave of Arab admixture that has extended from Egypt
and the northern provinces of Africa into the Soudan, and that of
the yellow races of China, who have already made their industrial
and social influence felt in many distant regions, and who bid fair
hereafter, when certain of their peculiar religious fancies shall
have fallen into decay, to become one of the most effective of the
colonising nations, and who may, as I trust, extrude hereafter the
coarse and lazy Negro from at least the metaliferous regions of
tropical Africa.
It is clear from what has been said, that men of former generations
have exercised enormous influence over the human stock of the
present day, and that the average humanity of the world now and in
future years is and will be very different to what it would have
been if the action of our forefathers had been different. The power
in man of varying the future human stock vests a great responsibility
in the hands of each fresh generation, which has not yet been
recognised at its just importance, nor deliberately employed. It is
foolish to fold the hands and to say that nothing can be done,
inasmuch as social forces and self-interests are too strong to be
resisted. They need not be resisted; they can be guided. It is one
thing to check the course of a huge steam vessel by the shock of a
sudden encounter when she is going at full speed in the wrong
direction, and another to cause her to change her course slowly and
gently by a slight turn of the helm.
Nay, a ship may be made to describe a half circle, and to end by
following a course exactly opposite to the first, without attracting
the notice of the passengers.
POPULATION.
Over-population and its attendant miseries may not improbably become
a more serious subject of consideration than it ever yet has been,
owing to improved sanatation and consequent diminution of the
mortality of children, and to the filling up of the spare places of
the earth which are still void and able to receive the overflow of
Europe. There are no doubt conflicting possibilities which I need
not stop to discuss.
The check to over-population mainly advocated by Malthus is a
prudential delay in the time of marriage; but the practice of such a
doctrine would assuredly be limited, and if limited it would be most
prejudicial to the race, as I have pointed out in _Hereditary Genius_,
but may be permitted to do so again. The doctrine would only be
followed by the prudent and self-denying; it would be neglected by
the impulsive and self-seeking. Those whose race we especially want
to have, would leave few descendants, while those whose race we
especially want to be quit of, would crowd the vacant space with
their progeny, and the strain of population would thenceforward be
just as pressing as before. There would have been a little relief
during one or two generations, but no permanent increase of the
general happiness, while the race of the nation would have
deteriorated. The practical application of the doctrine of deferred
marriage would therefore lead indirectly to most mischievous results,
that were overlooked owing to the neglect of considerations bearing
on race. While criticising the main conclusion to which Malthus came,
I must take the opportunity of paying my humble tribute of admiration
to his great and original work, which seems to me like the rise of
a morning star before a day of free social investigation. There is
nothing whatever in his book that would be in the least offensive to
this generation, but he wrote in advance of his time and consequently
roused virulent attacks, notably from his fellow-clergymen, whose
doctrinaire notions upon the paternal dispensation of the world were
rudely shocked.