Now Professor Pearson justly recognises and boldly admits the danger which attends the humanitarianism that has in large measure suspended the “struggle for life” among individuals, and has incited modern civilised nations to secure for all individuals born in its midst the food, shelter, and other necessaries enabling them to grow to maturity and to propagate their kind.
He sees quite clearly that this mere suspension of the individual struggle for life not only is not essential to the solidarity and efficiency of the nation, but that it impairs those virtues by burdening society with a horde of physical and moral weaklings, who would have been eliminated under earlier forms of the struggle for life. He rightly enforces the doctrine that a nation which is reproduced from its bad stock more than from its better stock is doomed to deterioration of physique and morale. It is as essential to the progress of man as to that of any other animal, as essential in the future as in the past, that reproduction shall be from the better stock and that the worst stock shall be eliminated. Humanitarianism and the sense of social solidarity by no means recognise, or even admit, that this condition should be sacrificed; they merely impose new methods on the process of selection.
Irrational nature selects wastefully and with the maximum of pain and misery, requiring innumerable individuals to be born in order that they may struggle and perish. Rational humanity would economise and humanise the struggle by substituting a rational, social test of parenthood for the destruction of children by starvation, disease, or weakness.
To prevent reproduction from bad stock, however difficult and dangerous it may be, is obviously the first duty of an organised society,