Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/616

596 French. Equally important, however, is it to consider the relative destruction which is annually being waged. If, as is asserted, these prolific Teutons are pre-eminently a city type, and if thereby they lay themselves open to decimation, the future balance of power in Europe may not be so completely disturbed after all.

These various social phenomena have been most ably correlated in a rather suggestive broad-line sketch of a mode of social selection given by Hansen. Basing his hypothesis upon data derived in the main from the cities of Germany, he distinguishes in any given population what he designates as three degrees of vital and psychic capacity respectively. The vitality is measured in each class by the ratio of the birth to the death rate. The first vitality rank consists of the well-to-do country people, leading a tranquil existence, healthy in mind and body, free alike from dread or aspiration. This class increases rapidly by birth, and loses relatively few by premature mortality. It has enough and to spare in numbers. Both country and city alike depend upon it for future growth. Below this is a second vitality rank, composed of the middle classes in the towns. Herein we find a somewhat lower birth rate; ambition and possibility of social advancement become effective in limiting the size of families. Coincident with this is a low death rate, owing to material comfort and a goodly intelligence. This class holds its own in numbers, perhaps contributes slightly to swell the census returns from year to year. Below this lies the third vitality rank, composed of the great mass of the urban populations, the unskilled labor and the poorer artisans. Here occur an abnormally high birth rate, little self-restraint, and, through ignorance and poverty, an inordinately high rate of mortality. This is the portion of the city population continually recruited from the country or through rejects from the superior classes—those, that is to say, who fail in the intense competition of the upper grades of society. Measured by vitality alone, it would appear that the first rank we have described—the average country population—were the ideal one. Applying, however, the tests of intellectual capacity, Hansen discovers curious cross-cleavages. For the country population is being continually drained of its best blood; those who are energetic or ambitious in the majority of cases leaving their homes to seek success in the city. Thus an intellectual residuum is left on the soil, representing merely the average intelligence; perhaps, if near a great metropolis, even falling below the normal in this respect. Those in their turn who emigrate to the towns are speedily sorted by inexorable fate. Some achieve success; the majority perhaps go