Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/365

Rh we deteriorate the race intellectually, for physical characters are not manufactured by school or college, but are bred in the bone, and if our intellectual classes are physically enfeebled by their intellectual exertions, are enervated by wealth and the love of pleasure, or restrained by prudence born of a wrong standard of life, so that they fail to supply us with a due proportion of intellectuals, then progressive decadence is in store for us.

For my own part, however, I am inclined to think that intellectual decadence, if it is upon us, is not altogether due to the causes assigned by Professor Pearson and Mr. Balfour, and is not necessarily destined to deepen as time goes on. In a people like ours, there is always outside the actually intellectual class, a still larger class, potentially intellectual with abilities incompletely evolved, because never called forth, but capable under stress of circumstance of the higher development, just as an ordinary working bee is capable of conversion into a queen by appropriate feeding. This potentially intellectual class, more prolific than the actually intellectual, may make up for its deficiencies and, breeding true or with favorable variations, supply us with intellectual leaders as good as any we have hitherto had.

Then I am quite sure that the educational ladders, provided hitherto to enable children of the humbler class to climb up in the social scale, do not by any means ensure the transference of the intellectuals from the lower to the higher level. They are mounted by the nimble, the quick-witted, the precocious, whose intellectual energies are in many instances soon exhausted, and around the foot of these ladders there remain numbers of children of really finer intellectual power but slower of growth than those who have scrambled up them. We have thus in our humbler or uneducated class, as they are called, a reserve of intellectuals of undiminished fertility, capable of supplying recruits to the intellectual class of the next generation. Many of our finest intellectuals have sprung from the unintellectual class, and genius is generally more or less of a sport.

My own view is that any dearth of ability from which we may be suffering or by which we may be threatened is to be ascribed not so much to the infertility of the cultivated classes as to the artificial production of stupidity in various ways and to the incessant draining from the country, which is the fit and proper breeding place and rearing ground of intellect, of the best elements of our people to be swallowed up, and exterminated or deteriorated in our big towns. We keep nipping off the buds of promise, and if we insist on having lots of green gooseberry tart, we must be content to go with less of ripe gooseberry jam. As Dr. Ogle has said, "the combined effect of the higher mortality of the town and of the constant immigration into it of the pick of the rural population, must clearly be a gradual deterioration of the