F. C. S. SCHILLER
war,[1] he foretold the collapse of European civilization and suggested that the Japanese or Chinese, through the greater importance they attach to the family, might be found more worthy of preëminence.
If the ancestor-worship of the animist can be developed into the descendant-worship of the eugenist, I can see no reason why one should not prognosticate for both of them a rosier future and a more assured continuance than for our European societies, if these latter yield to the pressure of those, whether called individualists, socialists, or militarists, who tempt them to destruction.
The danger to European culture lies, he says, in that "our Hellenistic political philosophy exhibits all the marks of senile dementia and progressive paranoia."
The evidence goes to show that throughout the most valuable part of the nation, not only in the upper classes but also in the middle classes and in the best parts of the working classes, the birth-rate per marriage has in a generation sunk from four and a half to two, and is now only half the size required to keep up the numbers in those classes. In other words, society is now so ordered that in every generation it sheds one-half of the classes it itself values most highly, and supplies their places with the offspring of the feeble-minded and casuallabourer classes, whose families still average more
- ↑ "Eugenics and Politics" in The Hibbert Journal, January, 1914.
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