Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/105

Rh primitive, aboriginal. His lineage has always been that of the clown and swineherd. The heavy jaw and slanting forehead can be found in the oldest mounds and tombs of France. The skulls of Engis and Neanderthal were typical men of the hoe, and through the days of the Gauls and Romans the race was not extinct. The 'lords and masters of the earth' can prove an alibi when accused of the fashioning of the terrible shape of this primitive man. And men of this shape persist to-day in regions never invaded by our social or political tyranny, and their kind is older than any existing social order.

That he is 'chained to the wheel of labor' is the result, not the cause, of his impotence. In dealing with him, therefore, we are far from the 'labor problem' of to-day, far from the workman brutalized by machinery, and from all the wrongs of the poor set forth in the conventional literature of sympathy.

XIV. In our discussion of decadence we turn to France first simply as a convenient illustration. Her sins have not been greater than those of other lands, nor is the penalty more significant. Her case rises to our hand to illustrate a principle which applies to all human history and to all history of groups of animals and plants as well. Our picture, such as it is, we must paint with a broad brush, for we have no space for exceptions and qualifications, which, at the most, could only prove the rule. To weigh statistics is impossible, for the statistics we need have never been collected. The evil effects of 'military selection" and allied causes have been long recognized by students of social science, but their ideas have not penetrated into the common literature of common life.

The survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence is the primal cause of race progress and race changes. But in the red field of human history the natural process of selection is often reversed. The survival of the unfittest is the primal cause of the downfall of nations. Let us see in what ways this cause has operated in the history of France.

XV. First, we may consider the relation of the nobility to the peasantry, the second to the third estate.

The feudal nobility of each nation was in the beginning made up of the fair, the brave and the strong. By their courage and strength their men became the rulers of the people, and by the same token they chose the beauty of the realm to be their own.

In the polity of England this superiority was emphasized by the law of primogeniture. On 'inequality before the law' British polity has always rested. Men have tried to take a certain few to feed these on 'royal jelly,' as the young queen bee is fed, and thus to raise them to a higher class—distinct from all the workers. To take this leisure class out of the struggle and competition of life, so goes the theory', is to make of the first-born and his kind harmonious and perfect men and