66 THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
longer considered reputable to enslave or exploit even defeated
aggressors. But Human Society has devised equivalent measures.
Instead of exacting payment of reparations by its enemies,
Human Society now imposes on its own members, other than
the poor of the land, whether alive or dead, taxation as
paralysing as it is punitive. Instead of subjecting defeated
foes to the yoke of slavery imposed by force, Human Society
now subjects its own members, rich and poor alike, to the
equally effective but often more galling yoke of convention and
custom. The Pride which once led powerful races to extermi-
nate, or exploit, or enslave weaker ones, has been replaced by
Prejudice, that remarkable human faculty which enables Man
to resist the tendency of Time to modify fashions of behaviour
and belief, yet is able, when Time's untiring efforts at length
succeed, to transmute new fashions into convention and custom.
In the physiological field the influence of Prejudice has been
just as marked. The two concerns of Physiology are Nutrition
and Reproduction, whose respective natural stimuli are hunger
and love: the former, as White of Selborne told us long ago,
ensures the preservation of the individual; the latter looks
after the perpetuation of kinds. Human Society, in its less
developed stages, regarded the preservation of individuals as
essentially an individual concern, but treated the perpetuation
of kinds as a duty of particular generations to succeeding ones.
Man attended to selection so as to secure pure lines of descent;
he regulated mating in order to maintain the health of the
community. His early methods of selection were empirical and
ineffective: that which recognised matriarchal descent only
ensured unilateral purity; that based on patriarchal descent
had the double defect of reducing woman to the status of a slave
from that of a symbiotic partner, and of affording no guarantee
of pure descent on either side. Man's early systems of endogamic
and exogamic mating may well have been effective; they
certainly were sufficiently complex.
The attitude of Human Society, in its developed stage, to these
biological duties has undergone a change. Man is slowly and
dimly beginning to realise that in dealing with disease "prevention
''is better than cure": as a result of his new care for the preser-
vation of the individual, the ratio of the unfit to the fit is steadily
rising. But Human Society now prefers to be guided by those