Windows of Love

domestic breeds generally threatened with dangers to life and limbunknown to their wiry ancestors in the wild state. And when one comes todeal with the infinitely more complex individuality of man, what hopewould there be of our improving the breed by deliberate selection? If wedeveloped the intellect, we would probably stunt the physique or themoral nature; if we aimed at a general culture of all faculties alike,we would probably end by a Chinese uniformity of mediocre dead level.

The balance of organs and faculties in a race is a very delicate organicequilibrium. How delicate we now know from thousands of examples, fromthe correlations of seemingly unlike parts, from the wide-spreadeffects of small conditions, from the utter dying out of races like theTasmanians or the Paraguay Indians under circumstances different fromthose with which their ancestors were familiar. What folly to interferewith a marvellous instinct which now preserves this balance intact, infavour of an untried artificial system which would probably wreck it ashelplessly as the modern system of higher education for women iswrecking the maternal powers of the best class in our English community!

Indeed, within the race itself, as it now exists, free choice, aided bynatural selection, is actually improving every good point, and is forever weeding out all the occasional failures and shortcomings of nature.For weakly children, feeble children, stupid children, heavy children,are undoubtedly born under this very regime of falling in love, whoseaverage results I believe to be so highly beneficial. How is this? Well,one has to take into consideration two points in seeking for thesolution of that obvious problem.

In the first place, no instinct is absolutely perfect. All of themnecessarily fail at some points. If on the average they do good, theyare sufficiently justified. Now the material with which you have tostart in this case is not perfect. Each man marries, even in favourablecircumstances, not the abstractly best adapted woman in the world tosupplement or counteract his individual peculiarities, but the bestwoman then and there obtainable for him. The result is frequently farfrom perfect; all I claim is that it would be as bad or a good dealworse if somebody else made the choice for him, or if he made the choicehimself on abstract biological and ‘eugenic’ principles. And, indeed,the very existence of better and worse in the world is a conditionprecedent of all upward evolution. Without an overstocked world, withindividual variations, some progressive, some retrograde, there could beno natural selection, no survival of the fittest. That is the chiefbesetting danger of cut-and-dried doctrinaire views. Malthus was a verygreat man; but if his principle of prudential restraint were fullycarried out, the prudent would cease to reproduce their like, and theworld would be peopled in a few generations by the hereditarily recklessand dissolute and imprudent. Even so, if eugenic principles wereuniversally adopted, the chance of exceptional and elevated natureswould be largely reduced, and natural selection would be in so muchinterfered with or sensibly retarded.