Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/500

486, can they hope to compete on equal terms with the strongest members, who would alone have survived? Is it true that the strong and competent are called upon to help the feeble and incompetent, who, by the marriages of the imprudent, would succumb either to competition, or to the action of the environment?

The melancholy Burton said: "A husbandman will sow none but the choicest seed; he will not rear a bull or a horse except he be right shapen in all his parts, or permit him to cover a mare except he be well assured of his breed." He inquires: "Quanto id diligentius in procreandis liberis observandum? And how careful, then, should we be in the begetting of our children!" Says Mr. Darwin, man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses and cattle before he matches them, but, when he comes to his own marriage, he rarely, or never, takes any such care. By giving the feeble a better chance to propagate their kind, philanthropy is only filling the world with the "infirm so called, to whom philanthropy is accustomed to give assistance," as well as keeping out the vigorous, who, it is assumed, will give assistance to the feeble members. The harsh result springing from a misguided benevolence is seen in another way. If we take care of the feeble and helpless, the diseases that appear in their race must be met by new remedies; and new causes of death have arisen from our philanthropic anxiety to suppress former causes of mortality in the feeble. To save and keep alive the weak to-day from injurious influences is to save and keep alive their descendants from totally different influences to-morrow. We suffer from diseases which were quite unknown to our ancestors, of the last century even. The inflammatory and febrile disorders from which they suffered have given place to disorders distinctly American. The neuroses, or nervous diseases, are doubtless intensified by the restless activity which characterizes the social, political, and industrial pursuits of our people; and cerebral difficulties of many forms which appear as types of nervous diathesis developed by our climate and institutions have now become functional.

It is difficult, therefore, to exaggerate the harm caused by the artificial preservation of the feeblest upon the physical status of future generations. The great harm consists in still further separating classes, and thus creating great inequalities of condition in every society. The artificial preservation of the feeblest is the artificial widening of those lines which Nature draws between one person and another; it gives rise to those natural differences among men which, as Mr. Galton has