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OCR Rendition - approximate
Eugenics as a Creed and the Last Decade of Gallon's Life 219 physical, intellectual and moral grounds, there must essentially be a least efficient as there will be a most efficient class. If inheritance holds for these characteristics then the relative fertility of these classes is of the utmost national importance. The same is true of the relative fertility of races and nations "The frequency in history with which one race has supplanted another over wide geographical areas is one of the most striking [incidents] in the evolution of mankind. The denizens of the world at the present day form a very different human stock from that which inhabited it a dozen generations ago, and to all appearance a no less difference will be found in our successors a dozen generations hence." (p. 10.) Galton notes the Europeans who have swarmed over all the temperate regions of the globe, forming the nuclei of many future nations, the disappearance of the American Indian and the appearance of 8,000,000 negroes in America. He might have added many other instances even within Europe itself. It is indeed true that we hardly allow our thoughts to rest on the startling racial changes which have occurred in Europe in the last three or four thousand years, and on the still more significant changes in dominant races all over the world during the last few hundred years. Those who fully realise the marvellous evolution of certain types of humanity at the expense of others will smile-sadly, it may be-and wonder whether it is feasible for any League of Nations, however strong, to fix and maintain national and racial boundaries, unless it shall have first fixed the relative fertility of all the tribes of man and, what is more, internationalised all the world's .resources ! As interclass struggle finds its hope of solution only in the socialism which teaches the nationalisation of the materials and means of production, so international struggle can only reach its conclusion by the universalism which demands internationalisation of the world's wealth. In the first case, national eugenics is the only means left to provide any nation with men strong in mind and body ; in the second case, international eugenics is the sole possibility of producing finer races of mankind. The men or group of men. who can say to a nation large or small : "This is your frontier and you must keep to it, will be forced ultimately and logically to the point, not only of internationalising the world's wealth and its means of transport, but also of saying : This is your appropriate fertility and you must keep to it." New modes of transport are rapidly making the world too small for mankind. Any plant or animal that overcrowds its proper region ends by destroying its fellows. The domesticated herd can alone thrive and progress on a limited pasture because the breeder stringently restricts its numbers, and picks from them those best fitted to their environment. Man, if he is to be freed from class struggle and from racial contests-that is to say, if he is to become thoroughly domesticated-can only thrive and progress if he breeds himself ; in other words he must replace the harsh processes of Nature, which in the long run grant survival solely to the physically and mentally strong-to brain and muscle-by the milder. practice of eugenics studied from the national and even the international standpoint. In the dimmest of distant futures we may see man fitting man to each region of his earth, and not 28-2
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