The Group Mind Part 17

CHAPTER XVIII

RACIAL CHANGES DURING THE HISTORIC PERIOD

We have found reason to believe that national character, as expressed in the collective mental life of any people, is only to be understood and explained when we take into account the native or racial mental qualities of the people; and we have seen reason to think that these racial qualities were in the main formed in the prehistoric or race-making period; we have noted some of the princ.i.p.al attempts to throw light on the prehistoric moulding of races. But these racial qualities, although very persistent, are not unalterable. We must, therefore, consider whether, and in what ways, the racial mental qualities of a people may have been changed during the nation-making or historic period. What are the factors which determine such changes? What is their influence on the destiny of nations?

The most diverse opinions are still held in regard to the question of the extent and nature of changes of innate mental qualities of peoples during the historic period, the period during which a people, or a branch of a people, attains political unity and becomes a nation.

There is no doubt that the moulding power of physical environment tends to become greatly diminished during this more settled period of the life of a people, and that, in so far as changes take place, they are determined princ.i.p.ally by racial subst.i.tutions and by social selections within a people, rather than by the mere struggle for survival of individuals or of family groups against the inclemency of nature or against other individuals and groups.

The former of these two modes of change, subst.i.tution, has undoubtedly been effected on a large scale, producing in certain instances radical changes in the racial quality of the populations of some countries; that is to say, there has been more or less gradual subst.i.tution of one race for another, while the nation as a geographical and political ent.i.ty, with its language and much of its laws, inst.i.tutions, and customs, lives on without complete breach of continuity, and the people, although by blood radically changed, continues to regard itself as the same people, accepting as its own the traditions of those predecessors whom they mistakenly regard as their ancestors.

Perhaps the most striking and complete change of this sort in European history was the change of racial character of the Greek people. It is now pretty well established that the Greek population of the cla.s.sical age was an incomplete blend of two of the three great European stocks, namely _h.o.m.o Europaeus_, the northern, fair, long-headed type of tall stature, and of _H. Mediterraneus_, the short dark long-headed type of the Mediterranean coast lands. The Pelasgians, who, as we now know, had achieved a civilisation of a type that was widely spread through southern Europe as long as three thousand years or more before our era, seem to have been of this Mediterranean race.

Rather more than a thousand years before our era, the Pelasgian population of Greece and the neighbouring regions began to be overrun and conquered by tribes of the fair Northern race which came in successive invasions, the Thracians, the h.e.l.lenes, the Achaeans, the Ionians, and later the Dorians. Just as, at a later period, men of the Northern race established themselves as a military aristocracy over the Celtic peoples of western Europe, so these invading tribes established themselves as a military aristocracy over the populations of Mediterranean race; and, as in the former case, so here, they intermarried largely with the people they conquered and formed an imperfectly blended population, in the upper social strata of which the fair type was predominant, in the lower strata the dark type.

From this happy blending of two races was formed the people which, under the favourable geographical and social conditions of that time and place, evolved the civilisation that culminated after six hundred years in the Athenian culture of the time of Pericles. And then, after a very short time, the whole of that splendid civilisation faded away, and the Greek people sank to a position of slight importance from which it has never again risen. After having displayed in several departments of the intellectual life a power and originality such as have never been approached by any other people, they became a people of very mediocre capacities, devoid of power of origination and purely imitative.

That this profound change in the mental qualities of the population of Greece was due to subst.i.tution of one racial stock by an inferior one is beyond question. That a great change of racial type was effected is sufficiently proved by the comparison of the physical type of the modern with that of the ancient Greeks. The modern are predominantly dark and round headed; the ancient were distinctly long headed, as shown by a sufficient number of skull measurements; and they were, as regards the dominant cla.s.s at least, predominantly fair in colour. It has been supposed that the many references to the fair hair and complexion of heroes and G.o.ds were due to fair persons being very rare and hence an object of special admiration; but there is no ground for this. The way in which this racial subst.i.tution took place is also pretty clear; and the rapid, almost sudden, decline of the intellectual productivity of the Greek people coincided in time with the racial change.

The first and most important factor in the extermination of the best blood of ancient Greece was military selection. Military group selection in the prehistoric period had, no doubt, played a great part in bringing about the evolution of the superior mental qualities of the European peoples, especially of the fair northern race. So long as the peoples consisted of more or less wandering tribes of pure race, which waged a war of extermination upon one another, the peoples and tribes of superior mental and moral endowments must in the main have survived, while those of inferior endowments went under. But, so soon as the Nordic tribes became settled as aristocracies ruling over the Pelasgian populations, the effects of military selection tended to be reversed; instead of making for racial improvement, they made for deterioration.

That racial deterioration occurs under these conditions seems to be an almost general law; it has been exemplified among many different peoples. The many small Greek states were almost perpetually at war with one another; and the result of the warfare was not so much the wholesale extermination of the people of any one state, as the killing off in large numbers of the younger men of the ruling caste, the free citizens of whom the armies were almost entirely composed.

The wars between Sparta and Athens were the most destructive and tragic of all in this respect. We know that the numbers of Spartans of the aristocratic cla.s.s, never very large, became fewer and fewer, in spite of efforts made to keep up the number by admitting to citizenship persons not of pure Spartan blood; and that Sparta was eventually destroyed simply for lack of men, men of the ruling cla.s.s[122].

In Athens and other states the depleting agencies were more numerous.

Frequent wars played the same part as in Sparta; and the number of free men was further diminished by the repeated founding of colonies, in which a relatively small number of persons of Greek blood became swallowed up in a large population of mixed and inferior origin. In some states, in Athens especially, the political conditions worked powerfully in the same direction. Prominent citizens were perpetually exiled or condemned to death, sometimes in considerable batches. It is said that at certain times two-thirds of the citizens of certain states were living in exile; and the exiles, going to the colonies or other foreign lands, were for the most part lost to the Greek people.

Then, with the blooming period of Greek intellect, came the loss of the ancient religious beliefs, beliefs which had strengthened the family and made each man anxious to have many sons that the rites might be duly performed for the repose of his shade. Coinciding with this was the great increase of luxury which made large families too expensive, save for the most wealthy; while at the same time the abundance of slave labour kept down the rate of remuneration of all handicrafts, and so condemned the cla.s.s of free Greek artisans to a state bordering on poverty. Hence, the free citizens of pure blood, already largely reduced in numbers, ceased to multiply; and the number of the citizens was only sustained by the admission to citizenship of foreigners, freed slaves, and various elements of different and inferior racial origins.

Hence, at the time that the battle of Chersonese was fought and the Macedonians attained the supremacy, the Greek citizens were no longer the same racial aristocracy which had produced the finest flowers of Greek culture. But the work of subst.i.tution was still only partially accomplished. In the time of the Roman domination of Greece, the remnants of the true Greek aristocracy were removed by the slave trade.

Tens of thousands of Greeks of all cla.s.ses were brought together to the slave markets; while those men of talent who escaped that fate emigrated to Rome to seek their fortunes by teaching the Greek language and art and philosophy. Later still came the Goths, who sacked the towns and destroyed or drove out the inhabitants. Then followed successive invasions of Slavs from the north; and lastly, the domination of the Turk well-nigh completed the extinction of the old aristocracy.

The modern Greek people is descended largely from Slav invaders and largely from the numerous and prolific slave population of the great age of Greece, but hardly at all from the men who made the greatness of that age.

Though the change and deterioration of the racial mental qualities of the Greek people by racial subst.i.tution is the most striking example in history, it is by no means the only one[123].

The subst.i.tution in that case was largely by elements drawn from other regions and peoples. But a similar subst.i.tution and consequent change of innate mental qualities may go on slowly within any people which has been formed, as have almost all the present European nations, by an incomplete blending of two or more racial stocks; it may be effected by internal selection without any introduction of new elements from any other region. Before considering an example of the process, let us note certain facts which show that there may well have taken place, throughout the historic period, changes of the composition of peoples by internal subst.i.tution or changes of the mental const.i.tution by internal selections-that is to say, by the more rapid multiplication of certain mental types and the relative infertility of other types. Consider first the striking fact that the populations of the various European countries seem for the most part to have remained almost stationary as regards numbers, or even in some cases to have diminished greatly in numbers, throughout the period between the Roman domination and the later part of the eighteenth century. The population of Spain is said to have declined from forty millions under the Roman rule to only six millions in the year 1700 A.D. The population of Great Britain is said to have increased from five millions to six millions only during the seventeenth century; and it is certain that in the main it had increased at an even slower rate, or not at all, in the preceding centuries since the Norman Conquest; whereas in the nineteenth century it increased from thirteen millions to nearly forty millions; that is to say, it trebled itself in the century; and even that rate of increase is considerably less than the possible maximal rate.

The same is roughly true for most of the European countries; their populations, throughout great stretches of the historic period, remained stationary or increased only very slowly. Now when, during any period, a population does not multiply at the maximal physiological rate, changes of its character may well be taking place; for, in proportion as the rate of increase falls below the maximal, there is a lack of fertility in the population or in some part of it; if this relative infertility affects equally all parts and cla.s.ses of the population, it will produce no change of its composition; but if it is selective, if for any reason it affects one cla.s.s, or persons of some one kind of temperament or mental type, more than others, then this cla.s.s or this temperament or this form of ability tends rapidly to diminish and to disappear from among that people.

The causes of the relative infertility may be divided into two cla.s.ses: (1) those which operate by killing persons before they have completed their middle life; (2) those which restrict fertility without killing.

Both may be selective in their action. The former kind is alone operative in determining evolution in the animal world and probably also among the less civilised peoples; but, as civilisation advances, the causes of infertility of the other kind increase constantly in effectiveness, while the former operate with less and less intensity. It is through the causes which diminish fertility merely, rather than exterminate individuals, that changes of racial quality of nations are now being, and in the future will be, princ.i.p.ally determined. Selection of this kind is usually distinguished from the various modes of natural selection which work by extermination, by the name 'reproductive selection.' Briefly, natural selection operates by means of selective death rate, reproductive selection by means of selective birth rate.

No doubt, disease, especially in the form of plagues and epidemics, was one of the princ.i.p.al causes of the slowness of increase of population throughout the Middle Ages. And this was probably non-selective as regards mental qualities, although it was strongly selective as regards power of resistance to disease, and has left the European peoples more resistant to most diseases than any other peoples, save perhaps the Chinese[124].

But many other causes of selection were at work. Disease presumably has not affected mental qualities by selection; although by direct action and mental discouragement it may have tended to the decay of civilisations; it has been argued, for example, that malaria played a great part in the decay of cla.s.sical antiquity, that it was introduced some centuries B.C. and enfeebled the population of Greece and Italy.

More interesting, from our point of view of the influences affecting the mental const.i.tution of populations, is the effect of alcohol. Dr Archdall Reid has argued very forcibly that resistance to the attraction of alcohol is a mental peculiarity which a race only acquires through long exposure to the influence of abundant alcohol; that populations are resistant just in proportion to their past exposure to it-as is true in the main of epidemic and endemic diseases-and that in both cases this is due to selection.[125]

Much careful painstaking work by continental anthropologists seems to have proved that a change of racial composition through internal selection has been and still is going on in both the German and French people. The facts have been worked out by O. Ammon[126], Hensen and De Lapouge[127]. They show, chiefly by means of the comparison of the forms of large numbers of skulls, that throughout the historic period the French and German peoples have been becoming more and more round headed, that the type of _h.o.m.o Alpinus_, the short dark round-headed race, has been gaining upon the type of _h.o.m.o Europaeus_.

We have seen that the latter stock of the fair northern type const.i.tuted the upper cla.s.s among the Gauls of Caesar's time; and the invasions of Franks and Normans must have added considerably to their numbers; yet, in spite of that, the mental and physical characters of this race are said by these authors to be now very much rarer than formerly, owing to the internal selections which have favoured the Alpine type. These took the following forms. In the first place, in the early Middle Ages, it is said, the Nordic type, being a military aristocracy, suffered, as in ancient Greece, proportionally far greater losses in warfare than the Alpine type. Secondly, the severe persecutions of Protestants in France drove into exile, besides killing many others, large numbers who were for the most part of the fair race, because, as we have seen, this race does not easily remain content within the Roman Church. It is said, for example, that, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, so large a number of Protestants pa.s.sed into Prussia that the rise of Prussia as a powerful State was the immediate consequence, with of course an equivalent loss to France. De Lapouge considers this the greatest blow that France has suffered in the historic period. Normandy alone, it is reported, sent 200,000 Protestants to Prussia. But the most important and curious factor has been, according to De Lapouge, what he calls the selection by towns. He shows, by comparison of ma.s.ses of anthropological observations, that the Nordic type has been predominantly attracted to the towns (which fact he attributes to their more restless enterprising character) while the dark type has been more content to lead the quiet agricultural life[128]. He points out that the town-life stimulates to a new struggle for adaptation, from which differentiation of cla.s.ses results; the longheads maintain their numbers better and rise in the social scale. Further, he shows that town-life makes against fertility, owing to a number of psychological influences-the stimulation of ambition and of the intellect, the luxurious habits, the weakening of family life, the break with the past and its family traditions, the uncertainty of the future, the weakening of religious sanctions; and he gives reason to believe that in this way the towns have been, through many generations, weeding out the elements of the fair race and determining an ever increasing predominance of _h.o.m.o Alpinus_.

In order to understand the importance of these internal selections, it is necessary to realise that their effects are c.u.mulative in a high degree, when the same influences continue to work through many generations. Thus, if within any people there are two equally numerous cla.s.ses of persons of different mental const.i.tution, _A_ and _B_, and if these const.i.tutions determine that the one group _A_ has a net birth rate of three children per pair of adults, while the other _B_ has a birth rate of four per pair of parents; then, in the third generation after one century, the numbers of the two cla.s.ses, other things being the same for both, will be as ten to sixteen. After two centuries the one cla.s.s will be more than twice as numerous as the other; and after three centuries the numbers of the cla.s.s _A_ will const.i.tute about fifteen per cent, only of the whole population. Late marriage is also very important. Suppose that of two cla.s.ses, _A_ marries at 35, and _B_ at 25 years, and that each produces four children per marriage; then (other things being the same) after three and a half centuries _B_ becomes four times as numerous as _A_. These two factors generally work together.

But, apart from the change of racial composition of a heterogeneous nation by internal selection of this sort, changes of the const.i.tution of even a racially h.o.m.ogeneous people may be produced through selection affecting persons of particular mental tendencies. One of the most striking instances of this is the elimination of the religious tendencies from the const.i.tution of a people by negative selection through the action of the Roman Church[129]. For many centuries the Roman Church has attracted to her service very large numbers of those who were by nature most religiously minded, and it has imposed celibacy upon them, it has forbidden them to transmit their natural piety to descendants. In Protestant countries this process of negative selection of the religious tendencies was continued for a much briefer period than in the Catholic countries. It is maintained with much plausibility that we may see the result in the fact that sincere and natural piety is far commoner in the Protestant countries than in the Roman Catholic; that in the two countries Italy and Spain, in which the influence of the Roman Church has been greater than in any others, the people are now the least religiously minded of any in Europe; that with them religion has become purely formal and external, that the ma.s.s of the people, though outwardly conforming, is absolutely irreligious; that in fact this form of religion tends to exterminate itself in the long run by insisting upon that form of reproductive selection[130].

Another striking instance of the incidence of negative selection upon certain mental qualities of a people is afforded by the history of Spain. In the sixteenth century Spain attained to a supreme position of power and grandeur among the nations of the world, such as has been rivalled by Rome alone in all history; and then very rapidly her power decayed, and ever since she has remained one of the most backward of European peoples, contributing little to European culture, to science, art or philosophy, incapable of developing without the aid of foreigners her rich industrial resources, impotent in war, entirely devoid of enterprise and originality. To what is this great change due?

It is not due to any adverse change of climate, to devastation by war or plague or famine, nor is it due to any change in geographical or economic relations. Spain remains more happily situated as a centre of commerce than any other country of the world. The ma.s.s of the people remains vigorous, proud, and virile. It is the intellect of the nation alone which has decayed, or rather it is the intellectual life of the nation that has become utterly stagnant.

Buckle drew a vivid picture of the stagnation of the Spanish intellect and sought the explanation of it in the great power wielded by the Roman Catholic Church, which, he said, had successfully fostered the spirit of protection and superst.i.tion, had discouraged every effort of the intellect, and utterly repressed the spirit of inquiry, to the free activity of which all progress of civilisation was, in his opinion, due.

Here, again, modern science shows that Buckle was led into error by his ignorance of the importance of the biological factors, the racial qualities and the changes produced in them by selection.

Galton and, still more fully, Fouillee have shown that the stagnation of the intellect of the Spanish people and the consequent decay of the power and glory of Spain have been chiefly due to the fact that the people of Spain ceased to produce those men of exceptional mental endowments, of intellectual energy and enterprise and independence of character, on whom primarily depend the power and prosperity of any nation and who are the most essential factors in the progress of the civilisation of any people, who in short are essential for the growth and endurance of national mind and character. And this was because during some centuries intellectual power, enterprise, and energy were steadily weeded out by a rigorous process of negative selection. In the first place, the Church, having attained enormous power, became in two ways a tremendous agency of negative selection. First, she made celibate priests of a very large proportion of all those whose natural bent was towards the things of the mind, multiplying monastic orders excessively.

Secondly, by means of the Inquisition she destroyed with fire and sword or drove into exile through many generations all those who would not conform to her narrow creed, who combined intellectual power with independence and originality of spirit and a firm will. In addition she drove out all the Jews and all of Moorish origin.

The second mode of negative selection, namely persecution exerted by the Church, was no doubt the more important, but the former also must have had a great effect. We are helped to realize the probable magnitude of the effect by reflection on facts set out in an article by Bishop Welldon[131]. He shows the great part played in English civilisation since the reformation by the sons of the English Clergy; including as they did a number of men of the highest achievements in all departments of our national life. If all those sons of clergy who have shown exceptional abilities, and all their descendants, had by the rule of celibacy been prevented from coming into existence, how disastrous would that have been for the English people, how much less successful and vigorous would the nation have become!

A second powerful agency of negative selection was the immense colonial empire which Spain so rapidly acquired, especially her American conquests. The whole people was seized with the desire to enrich themselves with the gold of the New World, and was fascinated by the idea of imitating the romantic adventures of Cortes and Pizarro. Great numbers of the bolder and most capable spirits set out for the New World, and there either lost their lives or remained to mix their blood with that of the native Indians or the imported negroes. In either case their stock was lost to the mother country.

The third and culminating cause was the career of military aggression pursued by Charles V; this completed the extermination of the aristocracy of ability and finally plunged Spain into an intellectual torpor which has persisted ever since and from which she can only be raised up by a succession of men of first-rate intellect and character: men such as she seems incapable of producing, because her people has thus been drained of all its most valuable elements, because her eugenic stocks have been exterminated.

The fall of Spain ill.u.s.trates not only the operation of internal social selection affecting certain mental qualities; it ill.u.s.trates also once more, even more clearly than the fall of Greece, the fact that the civilisation of a people and its power and position in the world depend altogether upon its intellectual aristocracy, and that the fall of a people from a high place necessarily follows the failure to continue to produce such an aristocracy.

In the civilised nations of the modern world, the most important kind of selection at work at the present time is what is distinguished as 'economic selection' working in conjunction with the formation of the social cla.s.ses. It has no doubt operated at various times among other civilised peoples, but never so strongly and universally as at present.

All the leading civilised nations have pa.s.sed, in the eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth centuries, through a period in which the discoveries of science have enormously increased the productive powers of man and man's control over, and power of resistance to, the forces of nature. The result has been that everywhere civilised populations have multiplied at a great rate, in a way that has never before occurred. But now this period seems to have definitely come to an end, and to have been succeeded by a new period characterised by three features which threaten to exert a most deleterious effect upon the innate mental qualities of peoples.

(1) The world is becoming filled up; the untouched wealth of enormous territories no longer lies open to the grasp of the bold and enterprising. The coloured races are entering into the economic compet.i.tion in the way foreshadowed by the late C. H. Pearson[132]. The high organisation of every form of economic activity renders the compet.i.tion for wealth everywhere extremely severe. And at the same time men have come to regard as necessities of life what, but a few generations ago, were the luxuries of the wealthy or unknown even to them; that is to say, the standard of comfort has risen greatly. The combined result of these changes is the increased difficulty of maintaining a family in the upper strata of society.

(2) There has been a great development of humanitarian sentiment, one result of which has been the breaking down of cla.s.s-barriers and the perfecting of the social ladder; at the same time it has produced such changes of our laws and inst.i.tutions as tend in an ever increasing degree to lighten the economic burdens of the poor and to consummate by social organisation the abolition of natural selection; that is to say, these changes are putting a stop to the repression by natural laws of the multiplication of the less fit, those least well endowed mentally and physically. The recent great decline of infant mortality is one evidence of this.

(3) The influence of religion and custom has weakened, and men are more disposed to adopt the naturalistic point of view, to believe that this life is not a mere preparation for an infinitely longer life elsewhere, but that it is all they can certainly reckon upon and, therefore, is to be made the most of; while at the same time they are oppressed by the severity of the economic compet.i.tion and by a sense of the lack of any ultimate purpose, end, or sanction of human effort.

The combined result of these three changes is a strong tendency to reverse the operation by which nature has secured the evolution of higher types of mind-namely, by breeding in the main from the higher types in each generation. We see a tendency for the population to be renewed in each generation preponderantly from the mentally inferior elements, those whose outlook hardly extends beyond the immediate future and who have not learnt to demand for themselves and their children favoured positions in the great game of life. The effects of these three changes operate in the following manner. The rate of reproduction, the birth rate, of nearly all civilised countries is falling rapidly (although the death rate also falls). This diminution of rate of reproduction is due to increase of celibacy, abstention from marriage, to increase of late marriage, and to voluntary restriction of the number of the family in marriage.

Now, it is shown statistically that this falling off of fertility chiefly affects the cla.s.ses above the average of ability, the upper and middle cla.s.ses and also the superior part of the artisan cla.s.ses[133].

These cla.s.ses have been formed and are maintained by the operation of social and economic compet.i.tion; they have long been, and are still, perpetually recruited in each generation from the lower strata, by the rise into them of the abler members of the lower strata. Hence, economic selection, under our present social system, seems to be working strongly for the mental deterioration of the most highly civilised peoples; the social ladder, becoming more nearly perfect, perpetually drains the ma.s.s of a people of its best members, enabling them to rise to the upper strata where they tend to become infertile[134]. Galton and Prof. Karl Pearson have insisted most strongly upon these tendencies. But they have not escaped the notice of continental authors. M. Jacobi[135] has written a large volume packed with historical ill.u.s.trations to prove inductively the law that aristocracies always die out, or are only maintained by constant recruiting from below, or in other words that aristocracies tend to become infertile. And the modern tendency which we have just now considered under the head of economic selection may be regarded as falling under the head of this law, a case of the extension of the law to democratic communities and the natural aristocracies of ability which are generated in them.

We may perhaps state the princ.i.p.al causes of this tendency in general terms as follows: the acquirement by any cla.s.s of leisure, culture, and the habit of reflection (the malady of thought) partially emanc.i.p.ates that cla.s.s from the empire of instinct, custom, and the religious sanctions of morality; and these are the great conservative agencies under the influence of which men not so emanc.i.p.ated continue to multiply according to the law of nature. These instincts, customs, and religious sanctions of morality, which lead men to multiply freely, have been acquired for the good of the race or of the society considered as an organism whose life is of indefinitely long duration; and in some respects they are opposed to the pleasure and welfare of the individual life. The habit of reason and reflection tends to lead men to act for their own immediate welfare, rather than for the future welfare of the race or of society, and to refuse to make those sacrifices of ease and to undertake those responsibilities and efforts which the care of a family imposes and which alone can secure the welfare of the future generations. It is in respect to these duties that the great antagonism between religion and reason appears in its most significant aspect.

The tendency for the upper cla.s.ses to die out and to be replaced constantly from the lower social strata by the aid of the social ladder is no doubt stronger now than in foregoing ages. But it has always been operative; and this is widely recognised; while the comfortable inference has often been drawn that the process is not only inevitable but actually beneficial and desirable. It is said that the upper cla.s.ses inevitably become effete, and that the lower const.i.tute an inexhaustible reservoir of mental and moral excellences, from which they are and can be indefinitely renewed; and thus the population is always rising in the social scale, a state of affairs which makes for social happiness.

But, if we take a longer view, the prospect is not so comforting; it seems only too probable that this constant dying away of society at the top and the renewal of the upper strata from the lower, by the agency of the social ladder, must sooner or later result in a serious deterioration of the lower strata, at least in draining it of its best stocks. There is also a return or downward current of less strength, which returns to the lower strata the failures, the incompetents, and the degenerates of the upper. And these two currents must, it would seem, in the course of ages render it impossible for the lower strata to continue to supply the superior elements required to maintain the upper.

If and when that stage is reached, national decay must set in.

In England, where the operation of the social ladder has been more effective and of longer duration than in any other country, there are indications that this stage is at hand. Our social ladder has provided and still provides a splendid array of talent, but already it has produced, as its complement, a large ma.s.s of very inefficient population. Foreign observers are constantly impressed with this; Mr Collier Price[136], for example, tells us that the million best of our population is the finest in the world; but that our lowest stratum is the most degraded and hopelessly inefficient.