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RACE IMPROVEMENT

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his nobler purposes into effect. He sees that some particular course of action is his duty, and should be his delight ; but his inclinations are fickle and base, and do not conform to his better judgment. The whole moral nature of man is tainted with sin, which prevents him from doing the things he knows to be right.

" I venture to offer an explanation of this apparent anomaly which seems perfectly satisfactory from a scientific point of view. I t is neither more nor less than that the development of our nature, under Darwin's law of Natural Selection, has not yet overtaken the development of our religious civilisation. Man was barbarous but yesterday, and therefore it is not to be expected that the natural aptitudes of his race should already have become moulded into accordance with his very recent advance. We men of the present centuries are like animals suddenly transplanted among new conditions of climate and of food ; our instincts fail us under the altered circumstances.

"My theory is confirmed by the fact that the members of old civilisations are far less sensible than those newly converted from barbarism, of their nature being inadequate to their moral needs. The conscience of a negro is aghast at his own wild impulsive nature, and is easily stirred by a preacher ; but it is scarcely possible to ruffle the self-complacency of a steady-going Chinaman.

" The sense of Original Sin would show, according to my theory, not that man was fallen from a high estate, but that he was rapidly rising from a low one. It would therefore confirm the conclusion that has been arrived at by every independent line of ethnological research, that our forefathers were utter