Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/103

Rh France, that the stature is lower, and the physical force less among the French peasantry than it was a century ago. If all this is true, then the cause for it must be in some feature of the life of France which has changed the normal processes of selection.

X. In the present paper I shall not attempt to prove these statements. They rest, so far as I know, entirely on assertions of French writers, and statistics are not easily obtained. It suffices that an official commission has investigated the causes of reduced fertility, with chiefly negative results. It is not due primarily to intemperance nor vice nor prudence nor misdirected education, the rush to 'ready-made careers,' but to inherited deficiencies of the people themselves. It is not a matter of the cities alone, but of the whole body of French peasantry. Legoyt, in his study of 'the alleged degeneration of the French people,' tells us that "it will take long periods of peace and plenty before France can recover the tall statures mowed down in the wars of the republic and the First Empire," though how plenty can provide for the survival of the tallest this writer does not explain. Peace and plenty may preserve, but they can not restore.

It is claimed, on authority which I have failed to verify, that the French soldier of to-day is nearly two inches shorter than the soldier of a century ago. One of the most important of recent French books, by Edmond Demolins, asks, "in what consists the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon?" The answer is found in defects of training and of civic and personal ideals, but the real cause lies deeper than all this. Low ideals in education are developed by inferior men. Dr. Nordau and his school of exponents of 'hand-painted science' find France a nation of decadents, a condition due to the inherited strain of an overwrought civilization. With them the word 'degenerate' is found adequate to explain all eccentricities of French literature, art, politics, or jurisprudence.

XI. But science knows no such things as nerve-stress inheritance. If it did, the peasantry of France have not been subjected to it. Their life is hard, no doubt, but not stressful, and they suffer more from nerve-sluggishness than from any form of enforced psychical activity. The kind of degeneration Nordau pictures is not a matter of heredity. Wlien not simply personal eccentricity, it is a phase of personal decay. It finds its causes in bad habits, bad training, bad morals, or in the desire to catch public attention for personal advantage. It has no permanence in the blood of the race. The presence on the Paris boulevards of a mob of crazy painters, maudlin musicians, drunken poets, and sensation-mongers proves nothing as to race degeneracy. When the fashion changes they will change also. Already the fad of 'strenuous life' is blowing them away. Any man of any race withers in an atmosphere of vice, absinthe and opium. The presence of such an