Galton enabled him to see this clearly afresh and to indicate the reasonable path of human progress. It was a truth that had long been forgotten by the strenuous humanitarians who ruled the nineteenth century, so anxious to perpetuate and multiply all the worst spawn of their humanity. Yet it was an ancient truth, carried into practice, however unconsciously and instinctively, by Man throughout his upward course, probably even from Palæolithic times, and when it ceased Man’s upward course also ceased. As Carr-Saunders has shown, in a learned and comprehensive work which is of primary importance for the understanding of the history of Man, almost every people on the face of the earth has adopted one or more practices—notably infanticide, abortion, or severe restriction of sexual intercourse—adapted to maintain due selection of the best stocks and to limit the excess of fertility. They largely ceased to work because Man had acquired the humanity which was repelled by such methods and lost the intelligence to see that they must be replaced by better methods. For the process of human evolution is nothing more than a process of sifting, and where that sifting ceases evolution ceases, becomes, indeed, devolution.[157] When we survey the history of Man we are constantly reminded of the profound truth which often lay beneath the parables of Jesus, and they might well form the motto for any treatise on eugenics. Jesus was constantly seeking to suggest the necessity of that process of sifting in which all human evolution consists; he was ever quick to point out how few could be, as it was then phrased, “saved,” how extremely narrow is the path to the Kingdom of Heaven, or, as many might now call it, the Kingdom of Man. He proclaimed symbolically a doctrine of heredity which is only to-day beginning to be directly formulated: “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.” There was no compunction at all in his promulgation of this radical yet necessary doctrine for the destruction of unfit stocks. Even the best stocks Jesus was in favour of destroying ruthlessly as soon as they had ceased to be the best: “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, ... it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.” Jesus has been reproached by Nietzsche for founding a religion for slaves and plebeians, and so in the result it may have become. But we see that, in the words of the Teacher as they have been handed down, the religion of Jesus was the most aristocratic of religions. Its doctrine embodied not even the permission to live for those human stocks which fall short of its aristocratic ideal. It need not surprise us to find that Jesus had already said two thousand years ago what Galton, in a more modern and—some would add—more humane way, was saying yesterday. If there had not been a core of vital truth beneath the surface of the first