Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace.
- Alfred Russel Wallace
- Date:
- 1913
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace. Source: Wellcome Collection.
151/180 page 139
![XVI] Progress Through Selection generations, as Malthus argued, popula¬ tions will increase beyond the means of subsistence. Then will commence a con¬ tinual decrease of well-being, culminating in universal poverty, worse than any that now exists, because it will be universal. The following quotation from an eminent American writer shows that this fear has really been felt : If it be true that reason must direct the course of human evolution, and if it be also true that selec¬ tion of the fittest is the only method available for that purpose ; then, if we are to have any race- improvement at all, the dreadful law of destruction of the weak and helpless must, with Spartan firmness, be carried out voluntarily and deliberately. Against such a course all that is best in us revolts, * A more recent writer, Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie, the well-known Egyptian explorer, has put forward similar views in a tentative manner, but clearly showing what he thinks our present state of society requires. Of the compensation to work¬ men for accident he says : The immediate efíect upon character is to save the careless, thoughtless, and incompetent from the results of their faults ; this at once reduces largely * Professor Joseph I<e Coûte, in The Monist, Vol. I., p. 334- 139](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18022121_0152.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
