< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu
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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

in a manner which befits a community of animals; he will divide the healthy and unhealthy, and the good breed and the bad breed, and will send away the unhealthy and badly bred to other herds, and tend the rest, reflecting that his labors will be vain and without effect, either on the souls or bodies of those whom nature and ill-nurture have corrupted, and that they will involve in destruction the pure and healthy nature and being of every other animal, if he neglect to purge them away. Now, the case of other animals is not so important—they are only worth mentioning for the sake of illustration, but what relates to man is of the highest importance; and the legislator should make inquiries, and indicate what is proper for each in the way of purification and of any other procedure. Take, for example, the purification of a city—there are many kinds of purification, some easier and others more difficult; and some of them, and the best and most difficult of them, the legislator, if he be also a despot, may be able to effect; but he who, without a despotism, sets up a new government and laws, even if he attempt the mildest of purgations, may think himself happy ii he can complete the work. The best kind of purification is painful, like similar cures in medicine, involving righteous punishment or inflicting death or exile in the last resort. For in this way we commonly dispose of great sinners who are incurable, and are the greatest injury to the whole state. But the milder form of purification is as follows: when men who have nothing, and are in want of food, show a disposition to follow their leaders in an attack on the property of the prosperous—these, who are the natural plague of the state, are sent away by the legislator in a friendly spirit as far as he is able, and this dismissal of them is euphemistically termed a colony. And every legislator should contrive to do this at once.

Now may we not claim Plato as a precursor of the modern eugenics movement? He grasped the intensity of inheritance, for he appeals to the herd and the flock; he realized the danger to the state of a growing band of degenerates, and he called upon the legislator to purify the state. Plato's purgation, if you will accept the view I have endeavored to lay before you to-day, has in fact hitherto been carried out by natural selection, by the struggle of man against man, of man against nature, and of state against state. This very cosmical process has so developed our ethical feelings that we find it difficult to regard the process as benign. A hundred years ago we still hung the greater proportion of our criminals or sent them for life across the seas, not even euphemistically terming it a "colony." We shut up our insane, making no attempt at cure; the modern system of hospitals and institutions and charities was scarcely developed; the physically and mentally weak had small chance of surviving and bearing offspring. There was a constant stern selection purifying in Plato's sense the state. The growth of human sympathy—and is not this one of the chief factors of national fitness?—has been so rapid during the century that it has cried Halt! to almost every form of racial purification. Is not this the real opposition which Huxley noticed between the ethical and cosmic processes? One factor—absolutely needful for race survival—sympathy, has been developed in such an exaggerated form that we are in danger, by suspending selection, of lessening the effect of those other factors which automatically purge the state of the degenerates in body and mind.

Do I therefore call for less human sympathy, for more limited charity, and for sterner treatment of the weak? Not for a moment:

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