THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1909. THE "SCIENCE" OF HUMAN INEQUALITY.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9592, 11 September 1909, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1909. THE "SCIENCE" OF HUMAN INEQUALITY.

Are wo about to abandon the idea of brotherhood of man? Docs modern science divide humanity permanently into inferior and superior races? "The real or pretended belief that underlies all slavery, that the children of certain perfectly healthy human beings are bound to grow up inferior to the children of other human beings, has more followers in the civilised world to-day than it has had for a hundred years." Such is the startling statement with which Mr William E. Walling opens a long article hi the "Independent," of New York. Mr Walling is a writer whose thoughtful contributions upon labour and sociql topics have attracted much notice in America. He has jußt made a thorough study of the negro question, and this article is the result. Its great significance justifies the following quotations fro.n so comprehensive a treatment of a subject which is as vital to th#> British Era--1 pire as to the United States of Am • erica:—ln the United States and Europe the belief in the existence of a "natural" hereditary aristocracy • has gamed the upper hand, and is now winning a foothold where it never had one before—that is, among political radicals and leaders of scientific and philosophical thought. The reader will readily recall the more and more cautious attitude assumed in public by the friends of the negro in the North. The portentous interest of this growing prejudice indicates a shifting in the whole basis of our political and social thought. For the fundamental and permanent inferiority of the negro to the white cannot be posited without conceding similar differences between other races and giving in> evitable if indirect support to the whole theory of blood aristocracy and caste. This means nothing less than a revolutionary change in the most fundamental life principle on which our nation has been evolved Obviousy this new theory of the dominance of 1

the "fittest" races is a backward I et°p from the ideas that prevailed among the intellectual elite of the North at tne time of the emancipation—a renunciation of the moat cherished and fundamental beliefs of Lowell, Phillips, and Emerson. Aristocracies have always compared themselves to superior and well-bred animals, and the Southern aristocracy applied stock-breeding principles to the negroes. Thanks to tne new doctrines of the survival of the fittest, these principles, anathematised by our revolutionary forefathers almost to the last man, are to be applied to the whole human race. Is it. not significant of the new reactionary spirit of our time that the able and very often humane and advanced Socialist, Bernard Shawy should De a leading expositor of "Eugenics," Galton's proposed science of human breeding? Shaw suggests only halfhumouroudly that the future will see a lethal chamber for those who ought not to be allowed to breed. The subject has become a leading one in the British magazines, and, as might have been expected in this aristocracy-laden atmosphere, has received support from all directions, even from scientists like Prof. William Ridgeway, president of the Anthropological Section of the British Association. The "scientific" doctrine.of human inequality was not burn yesterday. It had its earliest origin in the middle of the century, after the abolition of slavery in Kussia and the United States, where reactionaries needed some new basis for human servitude. The theory reaches its worst form, perhaps, among Englishspeaking writers. If it were not for this general scientific atmosphere, it might seem a mere eccentricity of genius that Rudyard Kipling should have adopted the creciJ of rioial superiority in its virulent and aggresive form. B':t the service which the inventor of the phrase "the white man's ,burcLn" has been able to render to the oppressors of the so called "lower" races the world over is due to forces entirely outside the writer's indivld- ; ual genius. The way was prepared for him by the scientists, and he has had no difficulty in finding authorities for those beliefs of his which sum up excellently the antisocial philosophy of our time.