The Task of Social Hygiene | Page 9

in
perpetual flux. Life is a process of perpetual movement. It is idle to bid
the world stand still, and then to argue about the consequences. The
world will not stand still, it is for ever revolving, for ever revealing
some new facet that had not been allowed for in the neatly arranged
mechanism of the statistician.
It is perhaps unnecessary to dwell on a point which is now at last, one
may hope, becoming clear to most intelligent persons. But I may
perhaps be allowed to refer in passing to an argument that has been
brought forward with the wearisome iteration which always marks the
progress of those who are feeble in argument. The good stocks of upper
social class are decreasing in fertility, it is said; the bad stocks of lower
social class are not decreasing; therefore the bad stocks are tending to
replace the good stocks.[11]
It must, however, be pointed out that, even assuming that the facts are
as stated; it is a hazardous assumption that the best stocks are
necessarily the stocks of high social class. In the main no doubt this is
so, but good stocks are nevertheless so widely spread through all
classes--such good stocks in the lower social classes being probably the
most resistent to adverse conditions--that we are not entitled to regard
even a slightly greater net increase of the lower social classes as an
unmitigated evil. It may be that, as Mercier has expressed it, "we have
to regard a civilized community somewhat in the light of a lamp, which
burns at the top and is replenished from the bottom."[12]
The soundness of a stock, and its aptitude for performing efficiently the
functions of its own social sphere, cannot, indeed, be accurately
measured by any tendency to rise into a higher social sphere. On the
whole, from generation to generation, the men of a good stock remain
within their own social sphere, whether high or low, adequately
performing their functions in that sphere, from generation to generation.
They remain, we may say, in that social stratum of which the specific
gravity is best suited for their existence.[13]
Yet, undoubtedly, from time to time, there is a slight upward social
tendency, due in most cases to the exceptional energy and ability of

some individual who succeeds in permanently lifting his family into a
slightly higher social stratum.[14] Such a process has always taken
place, in the past even more conspicuously than in the present. The
Normans who came over to England with William the Conqueror and
constituted the proud English nobility were simply a miscellaneous set
of adventurers, professional fighting men, of unknown, and no doubt
for the most part undistinguished, lineage. William the Conqueror
himself was the son of a woman of the people. The Catholic Church
founded no families, but its democratic constitution opened a career to
men of all classes, and the most brilliant sons of the Church were often
of the lowliest social rank. We should not, therefore, say that the bad
stocks are replacing the good stocks. There is not the slightest evidence
for any such theory. All that we are entitled to say is that when in the
upward progression of a community the vanishing point of culture and
refinement is attained the bearers of that culture and refinement die off
as naturally and inevitably as flowers in autumn, and from their roots
spring up new and more vigorous shoots to replace them and to pass in
their turn through the same stages, with that perpetual slight novelty in
which lies the secret of life, as well as of art. An aristocracy which is
merely an aristocracy because it is "old"--whether it is an aristocracy of
families, or of races, or of species--has already ceased to be an
aristocracy in any sound meaning of the term. We need not regret its
disappearance.
Do not, therefore, let us waste our time in crying over the dead roses of
the summer that is past. There is something morbid in the perpetual
groaning over that inevitable decay which is itself a part of all life.
Such a perpetual narrow insistence on one aspect of life is scarcely sane.
One suspects that these people are themselves of those stocks over
whose fate they grieve. Let us, therefore, mercifully leave them to
manure their dead roses in peace. They will soon be forgotten. The
world is for ever dying. The world is also for ever bursting with life.
The spring song of Sursum corda easily overwhelms the dying
autumnal wails of the Dies Iræ.
It would thus appear that, even apart from any deliberate restraint from
procreation, as a family attains the highest culture and refinement

which civilization can yield, that family tends to die out, at all events in
the male