The race grows ever weaker and less viable.
Physically. That better and more regular food exists only in the imagination of those few (one in six, is it, of the earth’s inhabitants, or eight?) who have it also in their bellies; over the crawling plains of the East, over the swollen stone agglomerations of the West, famine and undernourishment gauntly reign, a monarchy almost absolute. Conditions of life, as each year life moves to the million-cities, get each year worse. Disease more than keeps pace with the doctors, who less than keep pace with the germs and the rats. Little babies, brought forth on bare garret floors in the starving cold and cruel squalor of twentieth century night, die faster than the rats or the germs. Biologically we are retrograde, and soon will be degenerate; our fur has gone, our hair is going, our toes are numbing and our teeth dropping out. The look of age is upon us; compared to the proud races of prehistory, we are a decaying, doddering stock. What biological progress have we marked this last ten thousand years? What shadow of a sign of any such progress is there? Physique may be improving among the well-to-do, numerically insignificant, nuptially sterile; stamina is declining in all classes. Civilization is sapping man’s vigour, blunting his senses, always reducing the scope for his endeavour. He no longer needs strong right arm nor mental resource, no longer need fend for himself; the tribe, the State, the super-State is his protector, his poisoner, according him cheap survival for an ever smaller expenditure of brain and brawn. State and faculty have joined their murderous hands. Medicine, while saving the individual, enfeebles the race; the proportion of weaklings is mounting like a tide of death. If Adam was not the largest man, nor all the old Rabbinical estimates true, nor only giants in the land in those days, nor all men more splendid—if, in deference to the dogma of the literal and inspired untruth of every word in the Bible and the legends, these things must be denied, what then of the Crô-Magnon fossils? Surely geology, which routed Genesis, surely geology must speak the truth? But behold those skeletons and ours. Confront the old Magdalenes and their frail sisters of today. Compare the vanishing Highlanders and advancing Keelies, the yeoman of Middlesex and their Cockney supplanters, the Romans and the Romans, the men of tribal Manhattan and tumescent New York. Beauty? Consider the lilies of the field.
Intellectually. Punier in body, above all in brain. It is a demonstrable measurable fact that the great primitive peoples had more grey matter than we; the brain of Crô-Magnon woman equals that of modern man, and is much larger than that of her voting daughters. Are we a higher type than the citizens of Periclean Athens—or than his slave? Art, poetry and music are corpses. Tools do our “manual” work for us; the hand is losing its cunning, and with it a rich area of the brain its cunning also. When tools for mental work soon appear, the brain’s brightest regions will follow little toe and little finger into atrophy. The mind that looks to chemical aid to improve itself will be beyond improvement; monkey tricks with monkey glands will not seat us on God’s throne. Birth control is reducing the proportion of the mentally fittest and, allied with the doctors, though for the moment they are its foes, will hasten the decline and the fall; hastened also, from all sides the bad movement gathering momentum, by the brain-wear and nerve-strain of the coming centuries of nightmare speed, noise and number. Card-index will not save, nor catalogue. Accumulated facts and pigeonholed experience are not intellectual progress; they weaken not strengthen the racial memory and mind. Wisdom Peak was in Palaeolithic. The downward slope will be peopled with madmen, and cretins, and ghosts.
Morally. If Buddha walked again on the Kapilavastu road, he would meet the same Four Signs of misery, now as then; and none caring, less now than then. That every imagination of the thoughts of man’s heart is ever more evil continually, that the frost ahead like the flood before is due reward for a race unworthy to have lived, has not less witness to call than that pale doctrine of moral progress, whereby “good” is something positive and cumulative, growing in quality and quantity, whereby men are always better, relatively and absolutely, moving forwards and upwards—intrepid heavenly walkers—to heights of supernal worth by virtue whereof they shall have everlasting life. Where are they better? In which land of which sea? Not, assuredly, in the two great Messianic empires that today divide between them the adoration of the world—the tumbrils roll through Moscow, the death-pyres blaze through Texas. Assuredly not elsewhere: in which realm of which hemisphere holds not Inhumanity the sceptre of humanity, wears not Unrighteousness the crown royal? Look into all lands, and behold sorrow; look for judgment, but behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry. Than when are they better? Even our teachers are wavering; at last anthropology, turning from Tennyson to the truth, begins sulkily to allow that the common tradition of the race is right, that Arcadia long ago existed, that the Golden Age once was, that everywhere there is less liberty, less equality, less fraternity among the civilized nations of the present than among the uncivilized nations of the past, that every year, since in that fateful hour by the fruitful River civilization was first invented, injustice everywhere has waxed: from class to class, colour to colour, sex to sex, man to unbrothered man. Oppressions multiply, and on the side of the oppressors there is power. The spoilers shout for battle: 1914 outshone its predecessors, but will look dim beside its successors, now being made ready by patriotism run to paroxysm (fair pollen turned to foul poison), soon
