Ethics and some modern world problems / by Willam McDougall.

  • McDougall, William, 1871-1938.
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ethics and some modern world problems / by Willam McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ble strains of the hand-working class through many generations, becomes relatively infertile; within it, celibacy, late marriage, and the severely restricted family become the rule, while the fertility of the hand-working class is encouraged, and maintains itself or actually increases. Thus within the nation the principles of Universal Ethics, bringing about the regime of ultra-democracy, tend to produce on the small scale and are now actually producing within many, perhaps all, of the modern nations, that deplorable effect which they tend to produce and are producing on the world-wide scale, namely the progressive supplanting of the stronger strains by the weaker, of the more finely constituted by the more grossly constituted.1 1 Russia is not the only country in which the middle class is being exterminated so rapidly that the process forces itself on the atten¬ tion of every observer. Thus Mr. Langdon Mitchell after a visit to Germany in 1922, writes (Atlantic Monthly, April, 1923) of “one sinister phenomenon that impressed me most—the fall of the middle class. There was painful evidence of the decay of that class, on all sides. . . . The professional class, which creates and sustains civilization, is being rapidly abolished. It needs no Trotzky or Radek to destroy it; the tyranny of circumstance suffices . . . the scholarship, science, medicine, and art of Central Europe are actually disappearing.” And, he adds, the result must be that “the people that produced Luther, must necessarily perish as a creative force. That is, their civilization will cease to exist. But, civilization once