the “blood and tears” are no part of her aim. But they are inevitable, though lamentable, if her aim is to be realised. She _must_ be cruel to be kind--a little cruel to be very kind.[6] It is _imaginable_, though no more, that natural selection, in certain circumstances, might have worked otherwise: the penalty for less as against greater fitness might _imaginably_ have been not death but merely sterility--the denial of future parenthood. This is the ideal of race-culture. Had this been possible, Nature could have effected her end, which is fitter and fuller life, without having incidentally to mete out premature death to such an overwhelming majority of all her creatures. But, actually, this was not possible: and, unless the end was to be sacrificed, Nature was compelled--to keep up the figure--summarily to kill right and left. Permitted to reach maturity, the unfit as well as the fit would multiply; and since, in general, the lower the form of life the greater its fertility, the species could not possibly advance, or even maintain itself at the level already gained. To drop the figure, the process is a mechanical and automatic one, and its appalling wastefulness and indisputable cruelty are inevitably involved, whilst it so remains. =Intelligence may be kind to be kinder.=--But--and here is the great event--this mechanical, automatic, non-intelligent process has latterly given birth to intelligence, the moral intelligence of man: and the question now to be answered is, what modification can intelligence effect in the moral-immoral process that has created it? Must intelligence abrogate that process altogether, as Huxley declares, on the grounds of its murderous methods? Must intelligence simply look on, recognise, but not reconstruct? Must intelligence reverse the process--as indeed it is now doing in many cases--so that in the new environment of which itself is a factor, that which formerly was unfitness shall become fitness, and _vice versâ_? _Or_ is it conceivable that intelligence can transmute the process, so that, whilst hitherto mechanical, automatic, and therefore inevitably murderous, it shall become _intelligent_, pressing towards the sublime end, and reforming the murderous means? Hear Mr. Galton himself (_Sociological Papers_, 1905, p. 52):--