Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/457

Rh to Christianize the heathen, it exercises a far more direct and effectual influence in heathenizing Christians, and in dragging the rest of England down to its own low level." And he goes on to declare that "the enormous facts of London charity are to a lamentable extent responsible for this state of things."

Whether the law-abiding man is abnormal, according to Albrecht, and the criminal is normal—slaying and robbing without compassion, as do the animals below him—does not now concern us, for it has come to pass in the progress of the races that the moral man has formulated laws for the good of society, and insists upon obedience to their establishment. Intelligence and not brute force has become the main factor in man's selection. This has been foreshadowed in past geological times where it has been shown that in the progressive development of the various groups of mammals the brain increased in size out of all proportion to the size of the body. An ignorant man in civilized countries, and even in savage and barbarous countries, occupies the lowest position.

Among the dominant races ignorance, poverty, and crime are often associated. The association of poverty and crime has no immediate relation, as shown by Morrison, though poverty presupposes a low intellect, and this implies an inability to acquire an education, which in a hundred ways in civilized life leads to degeneracy and crime. It can probably be shown that nations that are in the worst plight politically and financially are those where general education is or has been at the lowest ebb, where superstition takes the place of knowledge. In Italy, for example, where an attempt to disinfect cholera districts results in the murder of the officers engaged in this beneficent work—where priestly processions and holy water take the place of quarantine and carbolic acid in fighting cholera—natural selection runs riot and mercifully removes priest and peasant alike. One word in that famous encyclical, in which half its anathemas were hurled against human reason and the sciences, might have changed all this, but the Church's attitude on these questions is one of the great factors in the selective category.

In this operation of the law of natural selection we have plainly indicated to us the principle with which to fight crime and pauperism. Let us pause for a moment and observe a few of the many ways in which this selective action is working in regard to man, and the suggestions to be derived from it. That the principle of natural selection works in Nature, no intelligent man doubts to-day. The discussion between Prof. Weismann and his