The dysgenic effects of this class-discrimination are further intensified by other tendencies: (1) The advance of medicine and hygiene has enormously diminished selective mortality in all classes, and improved the chances of weaklings to survive and leave descendants. (2) The advance of philanthropy preserves them, especially in the lower classes, where formerly the mortality was largely selective and a high death-rate both counteracted an excessive birth-rate and increased the value of the survivors. The emotional appeal of ‘baby-saving’ goes so directly to the heart of civilized man that his head never reflects whether the particular baby is worth saving, and whether a baby from a different breed and with a better pedigree would not be better worth having. (3) Modern obstetrics save the lives of thousands of women, whose physique is such that in former times they would inevitably have died in child-birth. The result is that child-birth is becoming more difficult. Also babies brought up on the bottle, which has an irresistible attraction for microbes of all sorts, are apt to be less healthy than those nourished in the more primitive manner. (4) Lastly, the bastardizing, which used formerly to provide for a considerable infusion of the blood of the upper classes into the lower, has now practically ceased. Since the merry days of King Charles II, very few noble families of royal descent have been added to the peerage. VII Our civilization, therefore, carries within it the seeds of its own decay and destruction, and it does not require high prophetic gifts to predict the future of a race which goes the way marked out for it by such perversely suicidal institutions. It cannot improve, but must degenerate, and the only question would seem to be whether the decadence of Man will leave him viable as a biological species. At present it looks very much as though his blind leaders would lead their blinder followers from catastrophe to catastrophe, through imperialist world-wars to class-wars and to race-wars: but even if, by some miraculous rally of human intelligence, these convulsions should be averted, the prospect will not really be improved. The violent destruction of the human race by war will only be more _dramatic_: it will not be more _fatal_ than its gradual decay as its arts and sciences slowly fossilize, or peter out, in an overwhelming flood of feeble-mindedness. VIII This is the one alternative. We shall get to it, if we go on as we are going: but it is not our doom. The alternative is to exercise the danger by an adequate reform of human nature and of human institutions. This again seems attainable in at least two ways.