Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/326

312 become weak; they are the one-eyed among the blind. We shall thus have obtained a survival of the weak, who will beget weak offspring. The argument of the Darwinians may then be turned back upon them, and we may propose on our side the following theorem: To realize the normal conditions most favorable to mankind is to assume the development and selection of a majority of the strong while saving only a minority of the weak; for to be sick is the exception when the conditions as to hygiene and food are at the best.

The reasoning of Mr. Spencer, repeated by M. de Candolle, is, in our view, valid only under abnormal conditions. If we bring up children effeminately, in mental and physical idleness, if we feed them on candies instead of bread and meat, if we keep them in a greenhouse and out of the open air, if we do not let them take any exercise for fear they will be tired, we shall evidently debase them, and prepare, through them, for the debasement of the race itself. In short, the causes for the deterioration of a generation are luxury, effeminacy, and idleness. There is nothing strange from this point of view in Dr. Jacoby's demonstration, that extinction is the ultimate fate awaiting every royal and aristocratic family, that it has come or will come upon the Cæsars, the Medicis, the Valois, the Bourbons, our French nobility, the Venetian aristocracy, and the English lords; for it is in such families that the causes of decay, inseparable from power and riches, produce their fatal results. Sterility, mental disorders, premature death, and the ultimate extinction of the race, do not constitute a future reserved particularly and exclusively for sovereign dynasties; all the privileged classes, all families occupying exclusively elevated positions, share the lot of reigning families, although to a lesser degree, which degree is always in proportion to the grandeur of their privileges and the altitude of their social state. But if we grant this principle for once, we may still ask the pessimist disciples of Darwin if philanthropy is in the habit of assuring to the needy the luxury and the soft life of aristocracies. It at least, one may say, permits idleness; but that is the fault of those who come to the assistance of the suffering workingmen, for it is their right and duty to require an equivalent in labor for the assistance they give.

We have as yet examined only the first of the Darwinian theorems relative to the effects of misapplied philanthropy: a society may deteriorate in a physical respect by the artificial preservation of the weakest, if it does not conform to the real course of nature. The Darwinians add to this that it will also deteriorate in a moral respect, by the artificial preservation of the individuals "least capable of taking care of themselves." The principle on which this new theorem is based is that the laws of heredity and selection are applicable to the moral as well as to the physical side. We admit that Messrs. Galton, Ribot, and Jacoby have undoubtedly established this principle. Moral