Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/101

Rh blood of the people concerned is, at once, the cause and the result of the deeds recorded in their history. For example, wherever an Englishman goes, he carries with him the elements of English history. It is a British deed which he does, British history that he makes. Thus, too, a Jew is a Jew in all ages and climes, and his deeds everywhere bear the stamp of Jewish individuality. A Greek is a Greek; a Chinaman remains a Chinaman. In like fashion, the race traits color all history made by Tartars, or negroes, or Malays.

The climate which surrounds a tribe of men may affect the activities of these men as individuals or as an aggregate; education may intensify their powers or mellow their prejudices; oppression may make them servile or dominion make them overbearing, but these traits and their resultants, so far as science knows, do not 'run in the blood.' They are not 'bred in the bone.' Older than climate or training or experience are the traits of heredity, and in the long run it is always 'blood which tells.'

IV. On the other hand, the deeds of a race of men must in turn determine its blood. Could we with full knowledge sum up the events of the past history of any body of men, we could indicate the kinds of men destroyed in these events. The others would be left to write the history of the future. It is the 'man who is left' in the march of history who gives to history its future trend. By the 'man who is left' we mean simply the man who remains at home to become the father of the family—as distinguished from the man who in one way or another is sacrificed for the nation's weal or woe. If any class of men be destroyed by political or social forces, or by the action of institutions, they leave no offspring, and their like will cease to appear.

V. 'Send forth the best ye breed.' This is Kipling's cynical advice to a nation which happily can never follow it. But could it be accepted literally and completely, the nation in time would breed only second-rate men. By the sacrifice of their best, or the emigration of the best, and by such influences alone, have races fallen from first-rate to second-rate in the march of history.

VI. For a race of men or a herd of cattle are governed by the same laws of selection. Those who survive inherit the traits of their own actual ancestry. In the herd of cattle, to destroy the strongest bulls, the fairest cows, the most promising calves, is to allow those not strong, nor fair, nor promising, to become the parents of the coming herd. Under this influence the herd will deteriorate, although the individuals of the inferior herd are no worse than their own actual parents. Such a process is called race-degeneration, and it is the only race-degeneration known in the history of cattle or men. The scrawny, lean, infertile herd is the natural offspring of the same type of parents. On the other hand, if we sell or destroy the rough, lean, or feeble calves we shall have