II.

We are now in a position to restate and test the scientific basis of imperialism regarded as a world policy. It is held that the maintenance of a military and industrial struggle for life and wealth among nations is desirable in order to quicken the vigor and social efficiency of the several competitors, and so to furnish a natural process of selection, which shall give an ever larger and intenser control over the government and the economic exploitation of the world into the hands of the nation or nations representing the highest standard of civilization or social efficiency, and which, by the elimination or subjugation of the inefficient, shall raise the standard of the government of humanity.

This statement withdraws the issue from the purely national-political and from the distinctively ethical standpoint, and refers it back to a scientific basis in the laws or analogies of biology.

Here we can profitably start from a statement of Professor K. Pearson:

History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of civilisation has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the survival of a physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate, on which probably so much of the Aryan’s success depended.

Assuming that this is a true account of the evolution of civilization during the past, is it essential that the same methods of selection must dominate the future? Are there no forces that have been coming into play during the later periods of human history which deeply modify, suspend and even reverse the operation of selective forces that dominate the rest of nature?

In the very work from which I quote, Professor Pearson furnishes a complete answer to his own contention for the necessity of this physical struggle between races. In the last sentence of the passage quoted he seems to recognize the utility in lower races of the physical struggle for life between individuals in the same tribe. But his general position as a socialist is very different. In order that a tribe, a nation or other society may be able to compete successfully with another society, the individual struggle for life within the society itself must be suspended. The competitive vigor, the social efficiency, of the nation requires a saving of the friction of individual competition for life or for the means of life. Now this is in itself a reversal of the generally recognized law of progress throughout the animal world, in which the struggle for food and other livelihood is held to be essential to the progress of the species, and that, too, though every species is engaged in more or less direct competition for food, etc., with other species. Cooperation, social solidarity, is indeed recognized as an adjunct of progress in many of the higher species, but the struggle between individuals for a restricted supply of food or other necessaries is maintained as a leading instrument of progress by rejection of the physically unfit.

Professor Pearson justly recognizes and boldly admits the danger which attends the humanitarianism that has in large measure suspended the “struggle for life” among individuals, inciting modern civilized nations to insure to all individuals born in their midst the food, shelter and other necessaries enabling them to grow to maturity and to propagate their kind. He sees quite clearly that this mere suspension of the individual struggle for life not only is not essential to the solidarity and efficiency of the nation, but even positively impairs its virtues by burdening society with a horde of physical and moral weaklings who would have been eliminated under earlier forms of the struggle for life. He rightly enforces the doctrine that a nation which is reproduced from its bad stock more than from its better stock is doomed to deterioration of physique and morale. It is as essential to the progress of man as to that of any other animal, as essential in the future as in the past, that reproduction shall be from the better stock, and that the worst stock shall be eliminated. Humanitarianism and the sense of social solidarity by no means require or even admit that this condition should be sacrificed; they merely impose new methods on the process of selection.

Irrational nature selects wastefully and with the maximum of pain and misery, requiring innumerable individuals to be born, in order that they may struggle and perish. Rational humanity would economize and humanize the struggle, by substituting a rational social test of parenthood for the destruction of children by starvation, disease or weakness. To prevent reproduction from bad stock, however difficult and dangerous it may be, is obviously the first duty of an organized society, acting alike in its own self-defense and for the interests of its individual members. It is not necessary for the safety and progress of society that “unfit” children should die; it is necessary that they should not be born, and ultimately the society which prospers most in the character of its members will be the one which best fulfills this preventive duty.

Yet when Professor Pearson passes from a society of individuals to the society of nations which we call humanity, he insists upon retaining the older, cruder, irrational method of securing progress, – the primitive struggle for physical existence. Why? If it is profitable and consonant with progress to put down the primitive struggle for life among individuals with one another, to suppress the family and tribal feuds which survive even in fairly developed societies and to enlarge the area of social internal peace until it covers a whole nation, may we not go further and seek, with hope, to establish international peace and cooperation, first among the more civilized and more nearly related nations, and finally for the complete society of the human race? If progress is served by substituting rational selection for the older physical struggle, first within small groups and then within the larger national groups, why may we not extend the same mode of progress to a federation of European states, and finally to a world federation? I am not now concerned with the grave practical difficulties besetting such an achievement, but with the scientific theory.

Although a certain sort of individual efficiency is sacrificed by repressing private war within a tribe or nation, it is rightly judged that the gain in tribal or national unity and efficiency outweighs that loss. May not a similar biological and rational economy be subserved by substituting government for anarchy among nations? We admit that a nation is strengthened by putting down internecine tribal warfare; what finality attaches to the social grouping we term a nation which obliges us to reverse the economy applicable to tribes when we come to deal with nations?