es, whom he considers an inferior race, breed like rabbits, while the
gifted exponents of _Kultur_ only breed like hares. The American is
nervous about the numbers of the negro; he has more reason to be nervous
about the fecundity of the Slav and South Italian immigrant. Everywhere
the tendency is for the superior stock to dwindle till it becomes a
small aristocracy. The Americans of British descent are threatened with
this fate. Pride and a high standard of living are not biological
virtues. The man who needs and spends little is the ultimate inheritor
of the earth. I know of no instance in history in which a ruling race
has not ultimately been ousted or absorbed by its subjects. Complete
extermination or expropriation is the only successful method of
conquest. The Anglo-Saxon race has thus established itself in the
greater part of Britain, and in Australasia. In North America it has
destroyed the Indian hunter, who could not be used for industrial
purposes; but the temptation to exploit the negro and the cheaper
European races was too strong to be resisted, and Nature's heaviest
penalty is now being exacted against the descendants of our sturdy
colonists. We did not lose America in the eighteenth century; we are
losing it now. As for South Africa, the Kaffir can live like a gentleman
(according to his own ideas) on six months' ill-paid work every year;
the Englishman finds an income of L200 too small. There is only one end
to this kind of colonisation. The danger at home is that the larger part
of the population is now beginning to insist upon a scale of
remuneration and a standard of comfort which are incompatible with any
survival-value. We all wish to be privileged aristocrats, with no serfs
to work for us. Dame Nature cares nothing for the babble of politicians
and trade-union regulations. She says to us what Plotinus, in a
remarkable passage, makes her say: 'You should not ask questions; you
should try to understand. _I am not in the habit of talking._' In
Nature's school it is a word and a blow, and the blow first. Before the
close of this article I will return to the eugenic problem, and will
consider whether anything can be done to solve it.

At the present time, when an apparently internecine conflict is raging
between the British Empire and Germany, a more detailed comparison of
the vital statistics of the two countries will be read with interest. In
England and Wales the birth-rate culminated in 1876 at a li