Now, this mode of improvement by elimination of the less desirable has many advantages over that of securing early marriages of the more admired; for what we most require is to improve the _average_ of our population by rejecting its lower types rather than by raising the advanced types a little higher. Great and good men are always produced in sufficient numbers and have always been so produced in every phase of civilisation. We do not need more of these so much as we want a diminution of the weaker and less advanced types. This weeding-out process has been the method of _natural selection_, by which the whole of the glorious vegetable and animal kingdoms have been developed and advanced. The survival of the fittest is really the extinction of the unfit; and it is the one brilliant ray of hope for humanity that, just as we advance in the reform of our present cruel and disastrous social system, we shall set free a power of selection in marriage that will steadily and certainly improve the character, as well as the strength and the beauty, of our race.
One of the most general and apparently the strongest of the objections to any thorough schemes of social reform, and especially to those that will abolish want and the constant dread of starvation is that, in any society in which this is done early marriages will be much more numerous; there will be no prudential checks to large families; and in a few generations, as Malthus argued, populations will increase beyond the means of subsistence. Then will commence a continual decrease of well-being, culminating in universal poverty, worse than any that now exists, because it will be universal. The following quotation from an eminent American writer shows that this fear has really been felt:
"If it be true that reason must direct the course of human evolution, and if it be also true that selection of the fittest is the only method available for that purpose; then, if we are to have any race-improvement at all, the dreadful law of _destruction of the weak and helpless_ must, with Spartan firmness, be carried out voluntarily and deliberately. Against such a course all that is best in us revolts."[139:A]
[139:A] Professor Joseph Le Conte, in _The Monist_, Vol. I., p. 334.