Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/104

94 may be an effect of race decadence, but it is not a cause of the lowered tone of the nation.

Evil influences may kill the individual, but they can not tarnish the stream of heredity. The child of each generation is free-born so far as heredity goes, and the sins of the fathers are not visited upon him. If vice strikes deeply enough to wreck the man, it is likely to wreck or kill the child as well, not through heredity, but through lack of nutrition. The child depends on its parents for its early vitality, its constitutional strength, the momentum of its life, if we may use the term. For this a sound parentage demands a sound body. The unsound parentage yields the withered branches, the lineage which speedily comes to the end. But this class of influences, affecting not the germplasm, but general vitality, has no relation to hereditary qualities, so far as we know.

In heredity there can be no tendency downward or upward. Nature repeats, and that is all. From the actual parents actual qualities are received, the traits of the man or woman as they might have been, without regard, so far as we know, to the way in which these qualities have been actually developed.

XII. The evolution of a race is selective only, never collective. Collective evolution, the movement upward or downward of a people as a whole, irrespective of education or of selection, is, as Lepouge has pointed out, a thing unknown. 'It exists in rhetoric, not in truth nor in history.'

No race as a whole can be made up of 'degenerate sons of noble sires.' Where decadence exists, the noble sires have perished, either through evil influences, as in the slums of great cities, or else through the movements of history or the growth of institutions. If a nation sends forth the best it breeds to destruction, the second best will take their vacant places. The weak, the vicious, the unthrifty will propagate, and in default of better, will have the land to themselves.

XIII. We may now see the true significance of the 'Man of the Hoe,' as painted by Millet and as pictured in Edwin Markham's verse. This is the Norman peasant, low-browed, heavy-jawed, 'the brother of the ox,' gazing with lack-lustre eye on the things about him. To a certain extent, he is typical of the French peasantry. Every one who has traveled in France knows well his kind. If it should be that his kind is increasing, it is because his betters are not. It is not that his back is bent by centuries of toil. He was not born oppressed. Heredity carries over not oppression, but those qualities of mind and heart which invite or which defy oppression. The tyrant harms those only that he can reach. The new generation is free-born and slips from his hands, unless its traits be of the kind which demand new tyrants.

Millet's Man of the Hoe is not the product of oppression. He is