multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth
century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must
be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality
grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires
equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in
the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically
doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an
approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society
in which all potential abilities are allowed to develop and function will
have a survival advantage in the competition of groups. This competition
becomes more severe as the destruction of distance intensifies the
confrontation of states.
The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has
no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce
abundantly. She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to the selection of
quality; she likes large litters, and relishes the struggle that picks the
surviving few; doubtless she looks on approvingly at the upstream race of a
thousand sperms to fertilize one ovum. She is more interested in the species
than in the individual, and makes little difference between civilization and
barbarism. She does not care that a high birth rate has usually accompanied
a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate a civilization culturally
high; and she (here meaning Nature as the process of birth, variation,
competition, selection, and survival) sees to it that a nation with a low birth
rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group.
Gaul survived against the Germans through the help of Roman legions in
Caesar’s days, and through the help of British and American legions in our
time. When Rome fell the Franks rushed in from. Germany and made Gaul
France; if England and America should fall, France, whose population
remained almost stationary through the nineteenth century, might again be
overrun.
