Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/63

Rh the breeding of the less fit, the level of the race may be raised, since the better strains will thus gain a greater and greater predominance over the weaker. Even if it be possible to gradually improve the poorer strains themselves (which we have said above is not probably), the sure and far more rapid method of improvement is the elimination of these weaker strains, and the multiplication of the better.

In two ways the progress of civilization has obstructed the propagation of the fittest, and facilitated the multiplication of the unfit. The first way is by the development of humanitarianism, and the development also of efficacious tools for its use: surgery, pharmacology, and prophylaxis, with large funds and personnel to apply them. By the active influence of humanitarianism, the less resistant, less virile, have been given a greater ratio of survival, and with the increase in survival has gone an increase in propagation.

I am not unappreciative of the benfits of humanitarianism; it is the real glory of civilization, and we would be Huns if we did not realize it. It is true that many of the individuals whom science and philanthropy snatch from untimely ends, although individually weaklings, are weaklings by economic accident and germ infection, but really belong to desirable stocks and are capable of propagating desirable progeny. Moreover, the