Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/63

Rh the contrary, shall we hospitably ignore all race distinctions in the interest of the American employer and impose upon our public school system the superhuman task of assimilating to our own standard this polyglot avalanche? An artificial element has here been introduced into group selection, which, as wholly under man's control, deserves careful study.

Sustentative selection, in the sense in which it depends upon a supply of food and shelter insufficient for the population, has been considerably overvalued as an evolutionary factor. Very few species are affected directly by it, as is shown by the rarity of starvation among the lower animals, and in man it has practically disappeared, unless it be in India, Siam or a few savage and barbarous tribes. The advance in the sciences and arts which has so wonderfully extended our supply of wealth has abolished any necessity for sustentative selection in the civilized world, except through the artificial scarcity often maintained by the ability of some individuals to divert to their own use, or even disuse, the possible subsistence of a multitude.

Even under these conditions, our growing sense of sympathy has tempered the severity of the struggle, and among the western nations men do not starve with the conscious consent of the community. Nevertheless, in spite of charity and the poorhouse, an indirect sustentative selection is shown clearly enough by the statistical correlation between poverty and the death rate, resulting probably from improper clothing and care, or in the case of infants, from a sort of semi-starvation due to lack of suitable food. Mortality among the poorer school-children results quite as often from lack of rubbers or medical attendance as from literal under-feeding, and the deaths from tuberculosis and drunkenness, so often the result of poverty, are not put down under the head of starvation.

Spencer, among others, has urged that charity be abandoned, in order that sustentative selection be again allowed full scope, but, aside from the terrible expense in human suffering that this method would entail, we can not afford thus to imperil social progress by allowing poverty to work its havoc unchecked. The moral and physical diseases originating in the submerged classes do not stop at the boundaries of the slums, and may corrupt both the fit and the unfit in their progress.

In deciding as to the eleemosynary projects, however, it is desirable that legislators and philanthropists should give the preference, other things being equal, to those institutions which save people with good inheritable qualities, running all others, as far as possible, on a celibate basis. The hospice for the goitrous in Aosta described by President Jordan, in which crétin mates with crétin, is a horrible perversion of charity to the service of degeneration.

Though civilization demands that lethal selection be reduced as far