National Life from the Standpoint of Science

Answers

• Q34CIVILIZATION

  Does superiority in industrial or military technology justify one people governing another?

  Yes. Progress comes through struggle between races, and a scientifically efficient nation is justified in displacing less efficient peoples.

  But America is but one case in which we have to mark a masterful human progress following an inter-racial struggle. The Australian nation is another case of great civilization supplanting a lower race unable to work to the full the land and its resources. Further back in history you find the same tale with almost every European nation. Sometimes when the conquering race is not too diverse in civilization and in type of energy there is an amalgamation of races, as when Norman and Anglo-Saxon ultimately blended ; at other times the inferior race is driven out before the superior, as the Celt drove out the Iberian. 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.

  OCR corrected

  Internet Archive catalogue pages (address at Newcastle, 19 November 1900; Adam and Charles Black, 1901); Wellcome Collection record. Argument summary from secondary description, not a reading of the text.