Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/98

94 wastes them." "This sublime and terrible phrase," says another writer, "sums up Spanish history."

In 1630, according to Captain Calkins, the Augustinian friar, La Puente, thus summed up the fate of Spain:

Another of the noblest of Roman provinces was Gallia, the favored land, in which the best of the Romans, the Franks and the Northmen, have mingled their blood to produce a nation of men, hopefully leaders in the arts of peace, fatally leaders also in the arts of war.

In that clever volume of his, Demolins asks: "In what constitutes the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon? "Before we answer this, we may ask, "In what constitutes the inferiority of races not Anglo-Saxon?" If we admit that inferiority exists in any degree, may we not find in the background the causes of the fall of Greece, the fall of Rome, the fall of Spain? We find the spirit of domination, the spirit of glory, the spirit of war, the final survival of subserviency, of cowardice and of sterility. The man who is left holds in his grasp the history of the future. The evolution of a race is always selective, never collective. Collective evolution among men or beasts, the movement upward or downward of the whole as a whole, irrespective of training or selection, does not exist. As Lepouge has said, "It exists in rhetoric, not in truth nor in history."

The survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence is the primal moving cause of race progress and of race changes. In the red stress of human history, this natural process of selection is sometimes reversed. A reversal of selection is the beginning of degradation. It is degradation itself. Can we see the fall of Rome in any part of the history of modern Europe? Let us look again at the history. A single short part of it will be enough. It will give us the clue to the rest.

In the Wiertz gallery in Brussels is a wonderful painting, dating from the time of Waterloo, called Napoleon in Hell. It represents the great marshal with folded arms and face unmoved descending slowly to the land of the shades. Before him, filling all the background of the picture with every expression of countenance, are the men sent before him by the unbridled ambition of Napoleon. Three millions and seventy thousand there were in all—so history tells us—more than half of them Frenchmen. They are not all shown in one picture. They are only hinted at. And behind the millions shown or hinted at are the millions on millions of men who might have been and are not—the huge widening human wedge of the possible descendants of the men who