All's Wrong with the World
The Survival of the Unfittest. By Charles Wickateed Armstrong. (The C. W. Daniel Company. 6s.)
IT seems almost irreverent to liken the author of this admirable exposure of many of the evils of present-day society to the Fat Boy of the Pickwick coach. But Mr. Armstrong is com- pelled by the ordinary logic of the reformer to make our flesh creep, and he does so to great effect over seven or eight of the eleven chapters which make up his case for eugenic reform. Thus we are told that through the introduction by Liberal statesmen of such Socialistic devices " as National Health Insurance, the dole and the pauper vote, Great Britain, pos- sessing the finest human stock in the world, is at the present time doing all in her power to destroy it. We are also assured that the system of insurance against unemployment is the most scientific means yet devised for insuring national decad- ence both physical and moral and—to descend to details—that as a race we are in serious danger of losing our teeth altogether !
The arguments of the writer are based, as he says, on a life- time of varied experiences in many lands and an unshakeable belief in evolution—i.e., natural selection as the method of progress intended for man by a Supreme Being who is at once God and Nature, eternal yet finite. What Mr. Armstrong has to say about the increase of distress and unemployment which follows upon each new legislative remedy embodying " social reform and humanitarian teaching " is backed up by the usual alarming statistics. But surely absence from England " during the greater part of thirty-five years " unfits a man for the task of showing Budge and Toddy how the wheels ought to go round quite as much as " placid contentment " with things as they are. It is necessary to have lived through the history of the last quarter of a century in this country in order to appreciate all the factors which have to be considered.
The weakest link in the chain of argument is the reference to the state of affairs in Italy as a proof that industrialized civilization is not necessarily democratic. To assert that Italy wag; never so prosperous nor so industrialized as she is to-day betrays an incomplete acquaintance with the actual conditions.
His only positive contribution to a solution of the problem is a proposal that some millionaire shall come forward and found a Eugenic Settlement in some suitable country district, so that outside the social, ethical, and political conditions of our time there may be built up gradually from this stock a physical and intellectual elite, a true aristocracy which will in time—one does not quite see how—undertake the proper governance of this wicked world.
Mr. Armstrong has written a notable book for the student of sociology and a very readable treatise for the ordinary layman. What may well be too much for the layman to stomach is that he should be expected to judge of social reform, the differential birth rate, &c., by • what may happen not simply in the next few generations but a hundred million years hence ! And surely it is no proof of the failure of democratic 'government that our political leaders should legislate to relieve immediate distress, even at the risk of making things worse for the next generation. The truth is that you can no more call a halt in order to introduce eugenic principles than you can to frame the perfect Christian Socialist State.
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