Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/98

 of the race is to be permanent, it must depend, therefore, not on education, but on breeding. And as a corollary to Mendel's theory, he gave me this, from the author of the Descent of Man: "There should be open competition for all men; and the most able should not be prevented by laws or customs (he might have added, or by education) from succeeding best and rearing the largest number of offspring."

But there are others among us who claim to have made a greater discovery than Science. These people scoff at romance, and extol a social system that would better man and redeem society, not by elimination, which breeding presupposes, but by the levelling process. Human power to them is an unmitigated evil; intellectual ability, a curse; genius itself, a crime. Nevertheless, it was one of their protagonists who wrote the Romance of Equality. But Carl Marx, its author, sees no salvation for humankind, except in political economy, the most uninteresting, to me, of all the sciences and, methinks, the least ennobling,