Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - Darwin and the Theory of Evolution.djvu/32

 Rh ready explanation for all evils—political, social, economic, and religious, or rather, anti-religious. Did a new and not particularly desirable philosophy spring up, a social system give evidence of decay, or the Christian church show alarming signs of becoming as defunct as Zoroastrianism, these gentlemen had the true cause at their finger tips. That cause was the iniquitous Mr. Darwin, who believed that one species of plant-louse could arise from another without the intervention of God the Almighty.

And so the war goes on. German Kultur, Bolshevism, weakening morals of educated people—these and many other scarecrows are the latest to be put in the witness box against Darwin, his followers, and even those scientists who oppose him. Willful ignorance and distortion of facts continue, and orators go from state to state, and even nation to nation, urging people to use their political power to do away with the teaching of so wicked a doctrine as the origin of species. Indeed, under the impetus of reactionaries who, dull as they are, perceive the extinction which threatens them and their kind, the war against fact is becoming more fierce than almost ever before. Perhaps the legal steps taken by the opposition will succeed for a time, at least; perhaps they will meet well-deserved failure. At any rate, those who are inclined to deny that evolution, mental or physical, progresses at an almost unbelievably slow pace, may do well to consider these facts: In 1923, sixty-four years after Darwin published the Origin of Species an American legislature voiced its attitude by opposing books in which the theory of evolution