BIOLOGY AND HUMAN SOCIETY. 65
in theory guided by a wish to increase the comfort of the present
generation, is in practice devoted to the destruction of the
work of earlier generations and seems inspired by a desire to
deserve the dislike of coming generations. Biology admits that the
association of Man with his machines now forms part of Human
Society, but doubts whether the association be a symbiosis
of Man with his inventions, or the enslavement of Man by his
mechanisms.
In the morphological field, Biology realises that the various
influences to which Man, as an animal, has, in different environ-
ments, been exposed, have brought about modifications in his
anatomical characters and mental qualities that justify the
recognition of distinct races. History assures us that some of
these races have at times claimed authority over others con-
sidered by them physically or mentally less powerful than
themselves. The crudest but most effective mode of enforcing
this assumed authority was to regard the weaker race as vermin.
Our authority for this statement is respectable: "they
"utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman,
"young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the
"sword." Archaeology assures us that the event thus graphically
described took place towards the end of the Bronze Age. Though
Letters suggest that the author of this gruesome tale may not
have witnessed the massacre, we cannot venture to hope that,
because this happened so long ago, the story may not be true:
we know that, without having recourse to the edge of the sword
our own more developed stage of Human Society has managed
to deal with the Andamanese, the Carib and the Tasmanian,
while our exiled cousins, whether of Roundhead or Royalist
origin, have tried to treat the Red Indian as Joshua treated
Jericho. But when, eight centuries after Joshua, Mesopotamia
dealt with the Jews as the Jews had dealt with Canaan, the
Jewish historian had to confess that his compatriots were the
more humanely treated. The successful "Captain of the Guard"
took care to "carry away" the well-to-do to weep by Babel's
streams and swell Babel's servile population, but "left the poor
"of the land to be vine-dressers and husbandmen" for exploita-
tion as payers of taxes and tribute. Now that Physical Science
has enabled Human Society to substitute high explosives and
poison-gases for spears and swords of bronze and steel it is no