Excerpt from Democracy, the First Century of the National Life: Is Political Self-Government a Failure?

Impressed with the necessity of some improvement in the quality of men, mr. Galton has devised a method for the artificial selection of the more strong and intelligent, and for keeping them from contact and inter mixture with the inferior, in order that by such means there may be finally secured the ability which he believes is now so generally wanting.

Mr. Darwin, after the labor of many years in collecting the facts which he has given to the world in regard to vegetable and animal life, does not reach conclusions so absolute as mr. Galton in regard to the more complex being called man.

I must take leave to doubt whether we are yet prepared to enter an intelligent judgment upon the points presented. The fact that a race is not fully equal to the requirements of a given time should not be esteemed of much value, especially when these requirements result directly from their own researches and inventions. In progressive times, theory is necessarily in advance of the application it requires and this is well, for we cannot be too sure of the truth of our theories. Probably no people will ever be able to make available all their knowledge, this being pre vented by various impediments of interest, habit, and inexperience in new relations, and many other related causes. But the desire to make their knowledge more fully available will be a constant incentive to their own improvement. While modern progress has not been so great as we could wish, and Success in practice might have been greater, the results achieved are in themselves so wonderful, that, when viewed apart, they seem sufficient to satisfy, for the time, the most exacting.

In Great Britain there have been known causes of repression quite sufficient to account for all the incompetency which mr. Calton's evi dence presents. It cannot reasonably be expected that a people reared under a narrow system, and many of them under very adverse circum stances, should manifest immediately the exceptional ability required under new conditions.

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