Karl Pearson: National Life from
the Standpoint of Science (1900)
History shows me one way, and one way only, in which a high state of
civilization has been produced, namely, the struggle of race with race, and the
survival of the physically and mentally fitter race. If you want to know
whether the lower races of man can evolve a higher type, I fear the only course
is to leave them to fight it out among themselves, and even then the struggle
for existence between individual and individual, between tribe and tribe, may
not be supported by that physical selection due to a particular climate on
which probably so much of the Aryan's success depended.
. .
The struggle means suffering, intense suffering, while it is in
progress; but that struggle and that suffering have been the stages by which
the white man has reached his present stage of development, and they account
for the fact that he no longer lives in caves and feeds on roots and nuts. This
dependence of progress on the survival of the fitter race, terribly black as it
may seem to some of you, gives the struggle for existence its redeeming
features; it is the fiery crucible out of which comes the finer metal. You may
hope for a time when the sword shall be turned into the plowshare, when
American and German and English traders shall no longer compete in the markets
of the world for their raw material and for their food supply, when the white
man and the dark shall share the soil between them, and each till it as he
lists. But, believe me, when that day comes mankind will no longer progress;
there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock; the relentless
law of heredity will not be controlled and guided by natural selection. Man
will stagnate; and unless he ceases to multiply, the catastrophe will come
again; famine and pestilence, as we see them in the East, physical selection
instead of the struggle of race against race, will do the work more
relentlessly, and, to judge from India and China, far less efficiently than of old. . .
There is a struggle of race against race and of nation against nation.
In the early days of that struggle it was a blind, unconscious struggle of
barbaric tribes. At the present day, in the case of the civilized white man, it
has become more and more the conscious, carefully directed attempt of the
nation to fit itself to a continuously changing environment. The nation has to
foresee how and where the struggle will be carried on; the maintenance of
national position is becoming more and more a conscious preparation for
changing conditions, an insight into the needs of coming environments. We have
to remember that man is subject to the universal law of inheritance, and that a
dearth of capacity may arise if we recruit our society from the inferior and
not the better stock. If any social opinions or class prejudices tamper with
the fertility of the better stocks, then the national character will take but a
few generations to be seriously modified . . .
You will see that my view---and I think it may be called the scientific
view of a nation---is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of
internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited
from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by
contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the
struggle for trade-routes and for the sources of raw material and of food
supply. This is the natural history view of mankind, and I do not think you can
in its main features subvert it. Some of you may realize it, and then despair
of life; you may decline to admit any glory in a world where the superior race
must either eject the inferior, or, mixing with it, or even living alongside
it, degenerate itself. What beauty can there be when the battle is to the
stronger, and the weaker must suffer in the struggle of nations and in the
struggle of individual men? You may say: Let us cease to struggle; let us leave
the lands of the world to the races that cannot profit by them to the full; let
us cease to compete in the markets of the world. Well, we could do it, if we
were a small nation living on the produce of our own soil, and a soil so
worthless that no other race envied it and sought to appropriate it. We should
cease to advance; but then we should naturally give up progress as a good which comes through suffering . . .
So far from our having too much of this spirit of patriotism, I doubt
if we have anything like enough of it. We wait to improve the condition of some
class of workers until they themselves cry out or even rebel against their
economic condition. We do not better their state because we perceive its
relation to the strength and stability of the nation as a whole. Too often it
is done as the outcome of a blind class war. The coal owners, the miners, the
manufacturers, the mill-hands, the landlords, the farmers, the agricultural
laborers, struggle against each other, and, in doing so, against the nation at
large, and our statesmen as a rule look on. That was the correct attitude from
the standpoint of the old political economy. It is not the correct attitude
from the standpoint of science; for science realizes that the nation is an
organized whole, in continual struggle with its competitors. You cannot get a
strong and effective nation if many of its stomachs are half fed and many of
its brains untrained. We, as a nation, cannot survive in the struggle for
existence if we allow class distinctions to permanently endow the brainless and
to push them into posts of national responsibility. The true statesman has to
limit the internal struggle of the community in order to make it stronger for
the external struggle. We must reward ability, we must pay for brains, we must
give larger advantage to physique; but we must not do this at a rate which renders the lot of the mediocre a wholly unhappy
one . . .
Science is not a dogma; it has no infallible popes to pronounce
authoritatively what its teaching is. I can only say how it seems to one
individual scientific worker that the doctrine of evolution applies to the
history of nations. My interpretation may be wrong, but of the true method I am
sure: a community of men is as subject as a community of ants or as a herd of
buffaloes to the laws which rule all organic nature. We cannot escape from
them; it serves no purpose to protest at what some term their cruelty and their
bloodthirstiness. . . Mankind as a whole, like the
individual man, advances through pain and suffering only. The path of progress
is strewn with the wreck of nations; traces are everywhere to be seen of the
hecatombs of inferior races, and of victims who found not the narrow way to the
greater perfection. Yet these dead peoples are, in very truth, the
steppingstones on which mankind has arisen to the higher intellectual and
deeper emotional life of today.
From: Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science, 2d Ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919), pp. 21-22, 26-27, 36-37, 43-47, 52-54, 62-64.