In National Life and Character (1894) Charles Pearson argued that the breakdown in ‘character’ and social cohesion in Britain, and his representation of the British working class as a threatening internal alien, was a phenomenon that was replicated on a global scale in the late nineteenth century. The economic and technological progress that characterised the industrial revolution in Britain had stimulated urbanisation, and unleashed, Pearson claimed, a ‘bestial element in man’, degrading the quality of civic and economic life, and leading to a rising population of ‘stunted specimens of humanity.’ Most analyses of National Life and Character focus on its fear of non-white races and influence on policies of racial restriction; we argue that National Life and Character is a more ambitious work of political economy preoccupied, as Pearson observed, with the ‘self-preservation’ of the white European race, grappling with the tension of managing a potentially degraded population as new forms of state intervention, decline of traditional religious faith, and global expansion transformed white society, leaving it vulnerable in the face of the rising non-European peoples. These concerns were shared by many of the architects of Federation, influencing the policy initiatives of the post Federation period.