CHAPTER XVI

NATIONAL EUGENICS: MR. BALFOUR ON DECADENCE

(1) “If the various checks specified in the two last paragraphs, and perhaps others as yet unknown, do not prevent the reckless, the vicious, and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has too often occurred in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule. It is very difficult to say why one civilised nation rises, becomes more powerful, and spreads more widely, than another; or why the same nation progresses more quickly at one time than at another. We can only say that it depends on an increase in the actual number of the population, on the number of the men endowed with high intellectual and moral faculties, as well as on their standard of excellence. Corporeal structure appears to have little influence, except so far as vigour of body leads to vigour of mind.”--Darwin, _The Descent of Man_, 1871.

(2) Referring to “the rates with which the various classes of society (classified according to civic usefulness) have contributed to the population at various times, in ancient and modern nations,” Mr. Francis Galton said “there is strong reason for believing that national rise and decline is closely connected with this influence.”--Galton, _Sociological Papers_, 1904, p. 47.

(3) “The inexplicable decline and fall of nations following from no apparent external cause receives instant light from the relative fertility of the fitter and unfitter elements combined with what we now know of the laws of inheritance.”[82]--Pearson, 1904.

(4) To the question, What were the causes of the fall of Rome? Mr. Balfour replies, “I feel disposed to answer, Decadence.”[83]--Balfour, 1908.

The lecture of which the previous chapter is the written form was prepared and delivered before I had an opportunity of seeing Mr. A. J. Balfour's lecture on “Decadence” delivered a few days before. That has since been printed, and is well worthy of our attention. In Mr. Balfour we have a representative political thinker, an experimental statesman and, furthermore, a former President of the British Association, deeply interested in, and favourably disposed towards, scientific enquiry and the scientific method. Further, this lecture has been widely noticed, though all the criticisms I have seen seem to me to miss the point. No apology, then, is necessary for a special discussion of this most suggestive lecture in direct relation with the foregoing theory of its subject.

Political and national decadence is Mr. Balfour's theme, and we note first that here is a contemporary thinker, not unread in recent biology, including the work of Weismann, who is prepared to make use of the idea that societies are inherently mortal, as individuals are. One wonders when we shall be rid of this pernicious instance of the argument from analogy, which is already much more than two thousand years old.

Next it may be noticed that, though Mr. Balfour has deliberately discussed the idea of natural selection, he has been led wholly astray from its true relation to the question under discussion by reason of falling into the common error which Sir E. Ray Lankester has recently exposed, as Huxley did several decades ago. Mr. Balfour conceives natural selection to issue from the struggle for existence between species or societies. It has already been pointed out that the all-important natural selection is not between species or societies but within them. The struggle for existence is fought out mainly between the immature individuals of any species or society. Its issue determines the survivors for parenthood and the future. Mr. Balfour must have read Professor Ray Lankester's recent Romanes Lecture in which all this is so clearly shown, but he has unfortunately retained the popular conception of natural selection as acting between species or societies, and has in consequence failed, I will not say to find, but even to discuss in any adequate measure, the theory of racial and national decadence, defined in the preceding chapter. He merely discusses “competition between groups of communities,” and rightly finds it inadequate to account for the great tragedies of history.

There follows a passage which may be heartily assented to, on the very grounds on which the entire lecture may be welcomed, namely, that it suggests the inadequacy of the common explanations of national decadence advanced by historians. Says Mr. Balfour:--

“It is in vain that historians enumerate the public calamities which preceded, and no doubt contributed to, the final catastrophe. Civil dissensions, military disasters, pestilences, famines, tyrants, tax-gatherers, growing burdens, and waning wealth--the gloomy catalogue is unrolled before our eyes, yet somehow it does not in all cases wholly satisfy us: we feel that some of these diseases are of a kind which a vigorous body politic should easily be able to survive, that others are secondary symptoms of some obscurer malady, and that in neither case do they supply us with the full explanation of which we are in search.”

One must heartily thank the author for the abundant demonstration which follows, well warranting our feeling that these explanations do not suffice--nor yet, in the case of Rome, diminution of population, nor the “brutalities of the gladiatorial shows,” nor “the gratuitous distribution of bread to the urban mobs,” nor yet slavery, lately declared, by Mr. W. R. Paterson, in his _Nemesis of Nations_, to be _the_ cause of the fall of empires. As Mr. Balfour says, “Who can believe that this immemorial custom could, in its decline, destroy the civilisation which, in its vigour, it had helped to create?” It would have been more important, perhaps, to consider, as Mr. Balfour does not, the latest view, advanced by Professor Ronald Ross, that the incursion of malaria may have had something to do with the fall of Rome.

=Mr. Balfour's theory--decadence the cause of decadence.=--Mr. Balfour then falls back upon “decadence "as the explanation, and to the critic of this elegant hypothesis that decadence is due to decadence, replies that it is something to recognise the possibility of "subtle changes in the social tissues of old communities.” One regrets all the more that he should not have considered anti-eugenic practices as possibly accounting for these subtle changes. One must, however, quote the excellent passage in which Mr. Balfour supports his use of the word decadence, though one utterly disagrees with the suggestion that the term “old age” might be its equivalent. He says: “The facile generalisations with which we so often season the study of dry historic fact; the habits of political discussion which induce us to catalogue for purposes of debate the outward signs that distinguish (as we are prone to think) the standing from the falling state, hide the obscurer, but more potent, forces which silently prepare the fate of empires.”

We may note with interest (and surely with surprise when we consider Japan and Spain and the China of to-morrow), Mr. Balfour's rejection of the doctrine that “arrested progress, and even decadence, may be but the prelude to a new period of vigorous growth. So that even those races or nations which seem frozen into eternal immobility may base upon experience their hopes of an awakening spring.” It is, I fancy, Mr. Balfour's fondness for the Platonic idea of senility in the race as in the individual, that leads him to question what can surely be no longer denied. Thus a little later we find him saying, “_If civilisations wear out, and races become effete_, why should we expect to progress indefinitely, why for us alone is the doom of man to be reversed?”

Nowhere in this lecture is there any recognition of what, I confess, seems to me to be an obvious and necessary truth, the distinction between the two kinds of progress--racial progress due to the choice of the best for parenthood, and acquired or traditional progress. It may be suggested that no one can usefully discuss decadence or progress until he has seen and perceived this absolutely cardinal distinction, suggested in my Royal Institution lectures in February, 1907, as one of the great lessons taught by the study of biology to the student of progress.

Mr. Balfour does indeed avoid all those false solutions which depend upon a Lamarckian belief in the transmission of acquired characters. This, however, instead of leading him to insist upon the Darwinian contribution to the study of decadence--the idea of _selection_--causes him to regard the racial question as unimportant. He notes one or two of the fashions in which the quality of a race may be modified, thus influencing national character, and then dismisses this question (wherein, as I cannot doubt, everything material lies) with the remark, “But such changes are not likely, I suppose, to be considerable, except perhaps those due to the mixture of races--and that only in new countries.”--Reaching page 45, the reader finds himself confident that now at length the writer has put his finger on the crux of the problem. Yet that is how he dismisses it; adding, indeed, to make it quite clear, the following words: “The flexible element in any society, that which is susceptible of progress or decadence, must therefore be looked for rather in the physical and psychical conditions affecting the life of its component units, than in their inherited constitution.”

Not a word as to cessation of selection! This omission, which is, indeed, the omission of _the_ fact of decadence, mainly depends, one fancies, upon that erroneous conception of natural selection as acting between species and societies rather than within them, which for so many decades the biologist has been at pains to correct. One would indeed have thought that, for a scholar and student like Mr. Balfour, Wordsworth's great sonnet would have sufficed to set up a train of thought which, fusing with ordinary biological principles, would have led him to what I believe to be the truth. Let us for a moment turn to its consideration:--

“When I have borne in memory what has tamed Great Nations, how ennobling thoughts depart When men change swords for ledgers....”

Should not this be enough to suggest to us the real meaning of the consequence which has followed when men changed swords for ledgers, and which even those who hate war as a vile blasphemy against life must recognise? It is that, as we have seen, when a nation is making its way there is selection of the fittest by the stern arbitrament of war, in which the battle is to the individually strong and fleet and brave and quick-witted. Later, “when men change swords for ledgers,” selection ceases; and that is why nothing fails like success. Yet later still, as France should know, selection by war must take the form of reversed selection, the flower of a nation's youth being immolated on the battle-field, whilst its future is determined by the weak and small and diseased, whom the recruiting sergeant rejects. “You are not good enough to be a soldier,” he says; “stay at home and be a father.” That was what Napoleon did for France.

But to return--for the relations of war to eugenics would really demand a volume--it may be noted that, though rejecting the Lamarckian theory--the theory on which nothing should succeed like success--Mr. Balfour nowhere emphasises the amazing paradox of history that nothing fails like success. If we consider this fact with the idea of natural selection in our minds (not between societies but within them), we cannot fail to perceive that success involves failure because it involves failure of selection, and therefore indiscriminate survival; or indeed, survival of the worst.

=Politics and domestics.=--It is, perhaps, a noteworthy comment upon what may be called the political state of mind, that even when the idea of natural selection has entered it, the bias is towards associating it with international and not with intra-national or domestic politics. The time will come, however, when the politician--or shall we say the statesman?--realises that it is the domestic policy, it is the internal struggle for survival within a society, that conditions and fore-ordains all international politics. The history of nations is determined not on the battlefield but in the nursery, and the battalions which give lasting victory are battalions of babies. _The politics of the future will be domestics._

Having rejected so many solutions of his problem, and having ignored the solution which is advanced in this volume, Mr. Balfour is reduced to such desperate resorts as phrases like this: “The point at which the energy of advance is exhausted”--a mere meaningless phrase; and even such an explanation as that through “mere weariness of spirit the community resigns itself to ... stagnation.” One is inclined to throw up one's hands and ask--Do you, then, who deny the Lamarckian theory, suppose that the fresh children come into the world with this “mere weariness of spirit”? Has this been observed in children? Is there anything conceivable that has been less observed in children, in all times and all places? And if that be so, what kind of explanation of decadence is this?

=Science and industry.=--Lastly, in a series of fine passages, Mr. Balfour offers us some hope in the help of science. Politics, says our ex-Premier, too often means “the barren exchange of one set of tyrants or jobbers, for another”: a Daniel come to judgment. We owe the modern spirit and modern progress, he tells us, neither to politicians nor to political institutions, nor to theologians nor to philosophers, but to science, which, he well says, “is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge; and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilisation.”

And our cause of hope is “a social force, new in magnitude if not in kind ... the modern alliance between pure science and industry.” To this I answer a thousand times yes, but I must define the kind of industry. It is the culture of the racial life which is the vital industry of any nation, and which Mr. Balfour has not even distantly alluded to. I agree that our hope for the future is to be found in science: that, as has been said already, perchance our acquired or traditional progress in knowledge has now reached the point at which we have sufficient to reveal to us the necessity of racial progress and the means by which that may be effected.

“Science and industry,”--yes, indeed! But the industry is to be the making not of machines but men. _The products of progress are not mechanisms but men_, and one may now ask, What is the industry whose products can be named in the same breath with the men and women who shall yet be produced by the supreme industry of race-culture?