Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/99

 For it promotes in a nation aggressiveness, sordidness, greed; and it schools the individual in the infinite stupidities of life—in figures, and measures, and stock-taking, and such like. Political economy is the bible of the philistine. And the philistine is one who has neither intellectual nor spiritual needs. Even the theory of evolution is more uplifting.

And Mendelism, in a material sense, is nearer to the truth. For though a votary of Marx, who, we will admit, is a slave under present political and industrial conditions, may succeed eventually in freeing himself, will he be able to transmit this freedom to his offspring? "A dwarf pea, born of a tall ancestor, breeds true to drawfnessdwarfness [sic]." And no knowledge in the science of political economy, no mastering of its details of production and consumption, no faith in the laws that govern them, can be of any help to man in combatting heredity and disease. If those who free themselves from the bondage of capital and labor have no other need than to earn