Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/93

Rh scientific knowledge, men have developed the fine art of selective breeding. With men, as with animals, "Like the seed is the harvest." In every vicissitude of race of men or of breed of animals, it is always those who are left who determine what the future shall be.

All progress in whatever direction is conditioned on selective breeding. There is no permanent advance not dependent on advance in the type of parenthood. There is no decline except that arising from breeding from the second-best instead of the best. The rise and fall of races of men in history is, in a degree, conditioned on such elements as determine the rise and fall of a breed of cattle or of a strain of horses. As progress in blood is conditioned on normal selection or the choice of the best for parenthood, so racial decline is conditioned on reversal of selection, the choice of the worst for survival.

Always and ever, says Novicow, "war brings about the reversal of selection." These traits of character, physical strength, agility, courage, dash, patriotism, desired in the soldier, are lost in the race which decrees the destruction of the soldierly. The delusion that war in one generation sharpens the edge of warriorhood in the next generation, has no biological foundation. The man who is left determines always the future.

Once, on the flanks of the Apennines, there dwelt a race of free men, fair and strong, self-reliant and confident. They were men of courage and men of action—men "who knew no want they could not fill for themselves." "They knew none on whom they looked down, and none to whom they regarded themselves inferior." And for all things which men could accomplish, these plowmen of the Tiber and the Apennines felt themselves fully competent and adequate. "Vir," they called themselves in their own tongue, and virile, virilis, men like them are called to this day. It was the weakling and the slave who was crowded to the wall; the man of courage begat descendants. In each generation and from generation to generation the human harvest was good. And the great wise king who ruled them; but here my story halts—for there was no king. There could be none. For it was written, men fit to be called men, men who are Viri, "are too self-willed, too independent, too self-centered to be ruled by anybody but themselves." Kings are for weaklings, not for men. Men free-born control their own destinies. "The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." For it was later said of these same days: "There was a Brutus once, who would have brooked the Eternal Devil to take his seat in Rome, as easily as a king." And so there was no king to cherish and control these men his subjects. The spirit of freedom was the only ruler they knew, and this spirit being herself metaphoric called to her aid the four great genii which create and recreate nations. Variation was ever at work, while heredity held fast all that she developed. Segregation in her