n a way which is impossible to the brutes. These
purposes are common to the large majority of men. No State can long
maintain a rigid and oppressive organisation, except under the threat of
danger; and a nation which aims only at perfecting its own culture is
not dangerous to its neighbours. It is probable that without the
supposed menace of another military Power on its eastern flank German
militarism would have begun to crumble.

In the second place, would the absence of sharp competition within the
group lead to racial degeneration? This is a difficult question to
answer. Perhaps a diminution of pugnacity and of the means to gratify
this instinct would not be a misfortune. But it is certainly true that,
if the operation of natural selection is suspended, rational selection
must take its place. Failing this, reversion to a lower type is
inevitable. The infant science of eugenics will have much to say on this
subject hereafter; at present we are only discovering how complex and
obscure the laws of heredity are. The State of the future will have to
step in to prevent the propagation of undesirable variations, whether
physical or mental, and will doubtless find means to encourage the
increase of families that are well endowed by Nature.

Assuming that a nation as a whole prefers a policy of this kind, and
aims at such an equilibrium of births and deaths as will set free the
energies of the people for the higher objects of civilised life, how
will it escape the cacogenic effects of family restriction in the better
classes combined with reckless multiplication among the refuse which
always exists in a large community? This is a problem which has not yet
been solved. Public opinion is not ready for legislation against the
multiplication of the unfit, and it is not easy to see what form such
legislation could take. Many of the very poor are not undesirable
parents; we must not confound economic prosperity with biological
fitness. The 'submerged tenth' should be raised, where it is possible,
into a condition of self-respect and responsibility; but they must not
be allowed to be a burden upon the efficient; and the upper and middle
classes should simplify their habits so far as to make marriage and
parenthood possible for the young professional man. Special care should
be taken that taxation is so adjusted as not to penalise parenthood in
the socially valuable middle class.

For some time to come we are likely to see, in all