ed and spread over
large countries, displacing inferior populations (which it well might
have done, for it was exceedingly prolific), it would assuredly have
accomplished results advantageous to human civilization, to a degree
that transcends our powers of imagination.

If we could raise the average standard of our race only one grade,
what vast changes would be produced! The number of men of natural
gifts equal to those of the eminent men of the present day would be
necessarily increased more than tenfold;... but far more important to
the progress of civilization would be the increase in the yet higher
orders of intellect. We know how intimately the course of events is
dependent on the thoughts of a few illustrious men. If the first-rate
men in the different groups had never been born, even if those among
them who have a place in my appendices on account of their hereditary
gifts had never existed, the world would be very different to what it
is....

It seems to me most essential to the well-being of future generations,
that the average standard of ability of the present time should be
raised. Civilization is a new condition imposed upon man by the course
of events, just as in the history of geological changes new conditions
have continually been imposed on different races of animals. They have
had the effect either of modifying the nature of the races through the
process of natural selection, whenever the changes were sufficiently
slow and the race sufficiently pliant, or of destroying them
altogether, when the changes were too abrupt or the race unyielding.
The number of the races of mankind that have been entirely destroyed
under the pressure of the requirements of an incoming civilization,
reads us a terrible lesson. Probably in no former period of the world
has the destruction of the races of any animal whatever been effected
over such wide areas, and with such startling rapidity, as in the case
of savage man. In the North-American continent, in the West-Indian
islands, in the Cape of Good Hope, in Australia, New Zealand, and Van
Diemen's Land, the human denizens of vast regions have been entirely
swept away in the short space of three centuries, less by the pressure
of a stronger race than through the influence of a civilization they
were incapable of supporting. And we too, the foremost laborers in
creating this civilization, are beginning to show ourselves incapable
of keeping pace with our own work. The need