Page:The Kingdom of Man - Ralph Vary Chamberlin 1938.djvu/35

Rh species includes a very large proportion of individuals who are eager, at any personal sacrifice, to spend themselves in promoting the betterment of their fellow men. Ingenuity, ideals of service, intelligence, a sifted and refined mass of traditional knowledge, techniques of scientific experimentation—all of these are available for man to improve himself, and he has tried to improve everything else except himself." —Hooton.

The result of man's smug content with himself is a portentously increasing mass of mediocrity and degeneration under the load of which his Utopia may collapse. In every age the tragedy has been repeated. An able people achieves a high culture and civilization, but in doing so provides conditions that favor the preservation of the inferior and that attract hordes from the outside by their promise of an easy living with a minimum of risk, quite as the same grade have been drawn to America. A principle long ago pointed out by Darwin, namely, that those organisms reproduce most prolifically who have least to transmit to offspring, holds for man. Inferior strains reproduce at double or more the rate of the more intelligent. They swamp the declining better stock, and ability no longer is produced in adequate supply to sustain the civilization. The unintelligent strength of numbers asserts itself and in the end another historic demonstration is given that a government "of the unfit, by the unfit and for the unfit cannot endure.' [sic]

The menace to racial welfare in all lands is this relative infertility of the superior types. The outstanding fact is that the ancient dysgenic process which has played a continuous role in tumbling state, race and civilization into a dusty heap with periodic certainty has been greatly and dangerously accelerated in our own day. In the face of our growing human difficulties many are lending a helping hand and are putting good-will, energy and enthusiasm into the work; but they are relying almost exclusively upon social regulations and laws with a disregard of the innate qualities of men that threatens disaster. They are too largely ignoring an obvious disharmony between social progress and biological progress. It has been said that our social engine has stalled. "A succession of political, economic and sociological drivers have been pulling and pushing every movable gadget in a futile effort to make it start. May not a biological bystander suggest the possibility that someone has put water in the gasoline?" Unless a race, while its liberties are increased, at least maintains an organic foundation capable of yielding the quality of sanity and capacity for productive work and for the achievement of satisfaction, anything in the nature of social evolution will fail.

The world is being filled up with human beings through an unprecedented rate of population growth made possible through the applications of science. The saturation point, however, is not far ahead. Before any stability in population is attained we are probably doomed for such conflict, suffering and disaster as we have not yet known, for we are probably living only in a lull before an inevitable clash of peoples in a madness growing out of population pressure. This might be avoided by recourse to forethought, but the prospect