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tion associated with them. But if there were to be any
enforcement of birth-control by authority, it is certain
that many new creeds would spring up which would
regard the practice as sinful, and the tenet would be held
with an enthusiasm not to be overcome by the efforts of
rational persuasion. There are many creeds, which we
hold to be unwise, which we can admit and leave alone,
because their effects are mainly to damage their believers.
This could not be one of them, since the believers would
automatically gain an undue share of the next genera-
tion. Persecution would be the only recourse against
such a creed, and the massacre of the innocents or the
blood of the martyrs would water the seed of the faith.
It is not of course true, as is sometimes maintained by
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religious devotees, that persecution always fails to ex-
tinguish a faith for example the Arian heresy was much
persecuted by the orthodox church, and there are no
Arians now but there is no doubt that persecution is a
great encourager, and it is fairly sure that not all such
creeds would be extinguished. Once again the effort to
produce comfortable prosperity would call for a brutal-
ity that is just the kind of thing it is trying to avoid.
It is not only the creation of creeds that may come
into play to prevent the artificial limitation of popula-
tions; in the very long run a deeper cause will arise to
prevent it. Through natural selection animals acquire
heritable qualities which fit them to survive, but nature
works in a very untidy way to achieve its ends, accepting
any method no matter how indirect it may appear to be,
so long as it is effective in producing the result. Man has
strong sexual instincts, and strong parental instincts, but
the procreative instinct, which would make him feel the
direct want of children, is much weaker. This did not
matter so long as the sexual instinct would ensure the
birth of children, but now it is no longer doing so.
Nature's untidy method has been defeated by the in-
genuity of man. There will be a revenge.
Though the procreative instinct is comparatively
weak, it is present in many people, and it is these people
who will have larger families than the rest. By the very
fact they will hand on the instinct to a greater fraction
of the population in the next generation. The process of
building a new instinct into the species will certainly be
a slower one than the operation of any creed, but it has
a permanence possessed by no creed. That an instinct is a
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very much more powerful thing than any creed may be
seen from the sexual instinct; there are many creeds
which place the greatest importance on the virtue of
chastity, but their prohibitions are seldom effective
against the instinct. There is no need for the procreative
instinct to become even remotely as strong as the sexual
for it to defeat any opposing creed that favours limita-
tion of populations, and so to perpetuate the over-
population of the world. Once this stage is reached,
nature will have taken its revenge, and there will be
little tendency for the instinct to increase further. It is
very much of a guess how long such a change will take,
but it should be far less than the million years of the
change of a species; some analogous considerations
which I shall develop in the next chapter suggest it
might be something like ten thousand years. After all,
for one thing, no very great increase is needed in an
already existing instinct, and for another the effect on
population from it is so very direct.
To conclude the chapter I return to the narrower
question of the tendency of civilization to eliminate its
ablest people. This has happened in the past, and is cer-
tainly happening now, and if it is always to happen, it
signifies a recurrent degeneration of all civilizations, only
to be renewed by the incursion of barbarians who have
not suffered similarly. If any civilized country could
overcome this effect, so that it alone retained both its
ability and its civilization, it would certainly become the
leading nation of the world. Man is a wild animal, and
cannot accomplish this by using the methods of the
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animal breeder, but may he not be able to devise some-
thing that would go beyond the long-drawn-out auto-
matic processes of Natural Selection? I think he can. A
cruder and simpler method must be used than the
animal breeder's. Something might be accomplished on
the line of what is called "Unconscious Selection" in the
Origin of Species.
Unconscious Selection signifies that the farmer, who
has no intention whatever of improving his herd, will
naturally select his best and not his worst animals to
breed from, and in consequence he will find that in fact
he does improve the herd. As I have pointed out, we are
all the time assessing the rival merits of individuals for
promotion; they are each chosen for some special pur-
pose, but like the unconscious selection of the farmer,
the choice does mark the promoted person as being
superior to the average. Any country that could devise a
method whereby the promoted were strongly encour-
aged to have more children than the rest, would find
itself soon excelling in the world. It would only be a
rough and ready method, with many defects; for ex- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]