wed to celibacy or the most
absolute Neo-Malthusianism. Nor, again, must it be said that social
reform destroys the beneficial results of natural selection.

Here, indeed, we encounter a disputed point, and it may be admitted that
the precise data for absolute demonstration in one direction or the
other cannot yet be found. Whenever human beings breed in reckless and
unrestrained profusion--as is the case under some conditions before a
free and self-conscious civilization is attained--there is an immense
infantile mortality. It is claimed, on the one hand, that this is
beneficial, and need not be interfered with. The weak are killed off,
it is said, and the strong survive; there is a process of natural
survival of the fittest. That is true. But it is equally true, as has
also been clearly seen on the other hand, that though the relatively
strongest survive, their relative strength has been impaired by the very
influences which have proved altogether fatal to their weaker brethren.
There is an immense infantile mortality in Russia. Yet, notwithstanding
any resulting "survival of the fittest," Russia is far more ravaged by
disease than Norway, where infantile mortality is low. "A high infantile
mortality," as George Carpenter, a great authority on the diseases of
childhood, remarks, "denotes a far higher infantile deterioration rate";
or, as another doctor puts it, "the dead baby is next of kin to the
diseased baby," The protection of the weak, so frequently condemned by
some Neo-Darwinians, is thus in reality, as Goldscheid terms it, "the
protection of the strong from degeneration."

There is, however, more to be said. Not only must an undue struggle with
unfavourable conditions enfeeble the strong as well as kill the feeble;
it also imposes an intolerable burden upon these enfeebled survivors.
The process of destruction is not sudden, it is gradual. It is a
long-drawn-out process. It involves the multiplication of the diseased,
the maimed, the feeble-minded, of paupers and lunatics and criminals.
Even natural selection thus includes the need for protecting the feeble,
and so renders urgent the task of social reform, while the more
thoroughly this task is carried out with the growth of civilization,
the more stupendous and overwhelming the task becomes.

It is thus that civilization, at a certain point in its course, renders
inevitable the appearance of that wider and deeper organization of life
which in the present vo