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74   Life and Letters of Francis Galton


and tend to reduce it into a closely united body with a single well-protected leader. The development of independence of character in cattle is thus suppressed far below its healthy natural standard by the influence of wild beasts, as is shown by the greater display of selfreliance among cattle whose ancestry for some generations have not been exposed to such danger." (p. 357.)

It would be impossible in a resume like this to cite all Galton's acute observations on the cattle herds of Damaraland, but the paper is well worth reading even to-day. He then proceeds to apply its lesson with certain modifications to savage man, but he insists

"on a close resemblance in the particular circumstance that most savages are so unamiable and morose as to have hardly any object in associating together besides that of mutual support."

As in the case of cattle herds there is a definite size in a given environment which is best suited to the human herd. A very large tribe is deficient in centralisation or is straitened for food and falls to pieces ; a small tribe is sure to be overrun, slaughtered or driven into slavery. The law of natural selection

"must discourage every race of barbarians which supplies self-reliant individuals in such large numbers as to cause- their tribe to lose its blind desire of aggregation. It must equally discourage a breed that is incompetent to supply such men, in a sufficiently abundant ratio to the rest of the population, to ensure the existence of tribes of not too large a size." (p. 357.)

Galton now proceeds to his 'moral': All through primaeval times, the steady influence of social condition summed up in the clan, the tribe, the petty kingdom tended to exterminate a superfluity of self-reliant men.

"I hold that the blind instincts evolved under those long-continued conditions have been deeply ingrained into our breed, and that they are a bar to our enjoying the freedom which the forms of modern civilisation could otherwise give us. A really intelligent nation might be held together by far stronger forces than are derived from the purely gregarious instincts. It would not be a mob of slaves, clinging together, incapable of self-government, and begging to be led; but it would consist of vigorous, self-reliant men, knit to one another by innumerable attractions, into a strong, tense and elastic organisation. Our present natural dispositions make it simply impossible for us to attain this ideal standard, and therefore the slavishness of the mass of men, in morals and intellect, must be an admitted fact in all schemes of regenerative policy. The hereditary taint due to the primaeval barbarism of our race, and maintained by later influences, will have to be bred out of it before our descendants can rise to the position of free members of a free and intelligent society; and I may add, that the most likely nest, at the present time, for self-reliant natures, is to be found in the States founded and maintained by emigrants." (p. 357.)

Wonderful, is it not, how Darwinism had already gripped Galton? How he thought in terms of heredity and natural selection and was ready to apply them to the past history of man in order to explain its present and suggest its future ! The notion that it is necessary for human progress to breed out the men of slavish morals and intelligence-the essential foundation of eugenics-is already a truth to him.

Democracy-moral and intellectual progress-is impossible while man is burdened with the heritage of his past history. It has bound mankind to a few great leaders ; it has produced a mass of servile intelligences ; and only man's insight-man breeding man as his domesticated animal-can free mankind. This was Galton's view. Possibly the historian of man in the dim future may grasp that man in the age of nations was as much a product