Now whilst the accumulation of knowledge and art and power from age to age is real progress, it evidently depends for its stability and persistence upon the quality of the race.[79] If the race degenerates--through, say, the selection of the worst for parenthood--the time will come when its heritage is too much for it. The pearls of the ancestral art are now cast before swine, and are trampled on: statues, temples, books are destroyed or burnt or lost. If an Empire has been built, the degenerate race cannot sustain it. _There is no wealth but life: and if the quality of the life fails, neither battleships nor libraries nor symphonies nor anything else will save a nation._ This we all know, though no one who observed our legislation or read our Parliamentary debates would suspect that it had ever entered into our minds. Empires and civilisations, then, have fallen, despite the strength and magnitude of the superstructure, because the foundations decayed: and the bigger and heavier the superstructure the less could it survive their failure. If the Fiji islanders degenerate, there is little consequence: if the breed of Romans degenerate, all their vast mass of acquired progress and power crushes them into dramatic ruin. This image, I believe, truly expresses the relation between the two wholly distinct kinds of progress, which we have yet to learn to distinguish. Acquired progress will not compensate for racial or inherent decadence. If the race is going down, it will not compensate to add another colony to your Empire: on the contrary, the bigger the Empire the stronger must be the race: the bigger the superstructure the stronger the foundations. Acquired progress is real progress, but it is always dependent for its maintenance upon racial or inherent progress--or, at least, upon racial maintenance. =Nothing fails like success.=--I believe, then, that civilisations and Empires have succumbed because they represented only acquired or traditional or educational progress and this availed not at all when the races that built them up began to degenerate. Now the only explanation of racial degeneration yet offered by the historians--apart from the foolish one of racial senility--is the Lamarckian one of the transmission of habits of luxury and idleness from parent to child: an explanation which the modern study of heredity empowers us to repudiate. What theory of this alleged degeneration is there to offer in its place: and especially what theory which explains racial degeneration amongst not the conquered but the conquerors: amongst the successful, the Imperial, the cultured, the leisured, the well-catered for in all respects, bodily and mental? Why is it that not enslaved but Imperial peoples degenerate? Why is it that nothing fails like success?