The Survival Of The Unfittest

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 113, 6 February 1937, Page 17

The Survival Of The Unfittest

(By

Channing Pollock;

Condensed from “The American Mercury.”)

IN the animal and vegetable kingdoms, the weak and maladapted do not survive. But among civilised races tiie unlit have survived; they are a multiplying majority which recurrently overwhelm civilisation. The stability of civilisation depends upon the dominance of the

lit few. An army which controlled the deciding voice in its own conduct wouldn’t get very far. Yet in a democracy, soon or late, the many discover that they can do what they please with tiie few; and then follows confiscation of wealth and seizure of Government, by ballots or bullets. The distinguished historian, W. M. Flinders Petrie, has traced the floods and ebbs of human accomplishment to the conclusion that “when democracy has attained full power, the majority without capital necessarily eat up the capital of the minority, and the civilisation steadily decays, until the inferior population is swept away to make room for a litter people.” All men may be created free, but no two men are equal. That, insofar as the Creator permits, they should have an equal chance, no one denies. The ideal society is that which affords every opportunity for improvement of self and estate; in which the citizen understands that success oi- failure rests with himself alone; and that equality is not a matter of law, but of achievement. In such a society the number of the lit steadily increases as the unlit aspire to fitness. There has been no exception to the rule ithat, with continued mob control, no matter how orderly, civilisation decays.

The decade before the World War represented our closest approach to the ideal society. True, we had not achieved the millennium; there were swindles, there were abuses, but most of us who were willing to work earned a pretty good living, and were progressing toward the earning of a better living on easier terms.

To-day we. have arrived at a crisis where civilisation must be carried on by superior ability, or surrendered to .superior numbers. And we have chosen to run the world for the benefit of the underdog. We are witnessing one of history’s greatest levellings, a vast equalising of incentives and rewards, the penalising of those capable of forging ahead, and tiie bringing up from the rear of those who are not. Our immediate concern is not where Washington got the idea that it knows more about running farms and factories and business than the men who have been doing the job successfully from the Declaration of Independence to the Declaration of Dependence. We can ignore the question whether this omniscience has been demonstrated in our postal service, or through Government control of railways during the war, and resist the impulse to quote Albert Jay Nock's observation that ‘‘State power has an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically or disinterestedly.”

What does concern us here is the fact that inherent in almost every utterance and activity of the New Deal is the effort to gratify a demand that no man shall be, do or have more than all men. It is desirable to enact laws to restrain the dishonest and predatory. It is important to urge and educate the backward Io effect better ethics and greater efficiency. But when a labour union or a legislature orders that no more than so many bricks shall be laid a day, that employers shall choose not the best typesetter, but the one who has been the longest out of a job, that each man shall have the same wages, and that no man shall cultivate more than so many acres, or raise more than so many hogs or potatoes, and that you and I shall pay him, not for what he does do, but for what he does notdo, then that union or legislature is reducing us to our lowest common denominator of laziness, thriftlessness and incompetence. To people thus reduced two things happen: Those who are weak become weaker, ever less willing and able to take care of themselves, and the strong—discouraged, robbed of inducement and recompense—sink back and eventually disappear. “Planned security” is the prerogative of convicts and slaves; it could never have produced the breed that discovered, colonised and enriched America.

Of course, the present programme is said to be “emergency.” But these emergency measures, being increasingly satisfactory to a considerable electorate, give every indication of permanence. By 1935 nearly half the population of New York City had applied for a hand-out, and a quarter of the population was getting it. Theoretically, all these are deserving people pitifully unable to find jobs. Actually, the inevitable growing demand for legitimate labour fails to keep pace with the Government’s corruption of its citizens, or the spreading realisation that it is no longer necessary to work in order to live on the authority of the Government itself. In the same week this year that Congress voted another billion and a half for relief, there were 5,000,000 more persons employed than in 1933—and 3,000,000 more on the relief rolls. These do not include the farmers paid for not tilling the soil, nor the soldiers given a couple of billions, nor yet the army of red-tapeworms in one bureau or another that receives four billion dollars a year—3B per cent, of all the taxes collected. At the moment 12,583,552 Americans—more than one-tenth of the population—are drawing money from the United States Treasury, and, if we allow each a single dependant, one of every live of us is being subsidised by the Government. No one who looks or listens can have any illusion as to the quantity and quality of labour required of this multitude, nor as to their disinclination to seek other employment. Who is to pay all this? The tit. of course. How is another question. "Distribution of wealth” has a fine sound in the ears of those who have none, but how is it accomplished? Wealth is not money, but the means of producing things that may be exchanged for money: when you destroy or divide these means you are not distributing wealth, but ending it. Factories are worth only as much as the ability that directs them. You can run a billion dollars’ worth of factories into bankruptcy in a year; I would trust any bureau in Washington to do it. Wealth is distributed in tiie process of its creation—in wages, rents ami oilier payments. Take it from the men capable of creating it, and at that moment it ceases to exist. If the “capital” to which Petrie alludes were only money, if the majority in full power were content to mulct superiority without hamstringing it, the results might not be so fatal. But fitness cannot survive regimentation, the destruction of initiative.

We talk of “social security”; there is not a conspicuously good and useful citizen in America to-day who is not being threatened and harassed almost to the point of defection. 1 don’t mean only captains of industry: I mean doctors and tradesmen and skilled' artisans; every man-jack of us who has won his office or shop, who has a dollar in money, life insurance, securities and mortagages. We are surrounded by tax devisers and bureaucrats who want to run our business and our everyday lives. We believe that votes can be bought—are being bought—with our money, and that there are enough of these voters to do as they will with us. We believe that any organised group can grab as much as it wishes out of the Treasury. I am willing to become a Bolshevist, an Inflationist or a Townsendite if I can bo persuaded that any of these panaceas can be made to operate to the advantage of mankind. But I can discover no instance where they have operated to the advantage of anyone but their chief protagonists. Famines never empty the stomachs of the Stalins. Printing-press money enriched the politicians in France, Germany and Austria, ruined the middle class, and left labour wondering how to get the hundreds of francs or millions of marks and kronen needed to buy dinner. The happiest land and the highest civilisation is that in which every capitalist is an unhampered labourer, and every labourer a potential capitalist. Utopia is approached by degrees, not decrees —by the slow, toilsome improvement of the race. There never will be a Utopia of and for weakness and sbiftlessness. “Every man a king” is a good trick if yon can do it. God couldn’t, or didn’t. It might be better to inculcate in mankind the aspiration to be royal, and leave the world in the hands of those vvho can make the grade.