Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/505

Rh terrible revenge. In former days, tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid fever and smallpox swept through the land, removing crowds of the unfit and those not immune to these diseases, leaving the sound, the hearty, and the immune to become the fathers and mothers of the next generation.

Perhaps the clearest statement of these views is found in an article on "Decadence and Civilization," by W. C. D. and Catherine D. Whetham in a recent number of The Hibbert Journal. These writers point out that in all our sympathetic care for the unfit we are sacrificing heredity to environment. "It is conceivable," they say, for instance, "that a wilderness of sanatoria may serve as easily to increase tubercular disease in the future as to diminish it in the present." As regards our warfare against alcohol, they continue, we are only laying up for ourselves future trouble. The races of southern Europe, where wine is abundant, have gradually become immune to alcohol, those families not able to use it moderately having perished, so that drunkenness, while formerly common in these countries, is now rare. Hence it is urged that, if by restrictive measures we make alcohol unattainable for the present, in the future a demoralizing wave of alcoholism will overcome all barriers, showing again that we are sacrificing heredity to present environment.

Again, still further and still worse, it is said, the emergence of woman into industrial and political life, while it will purify and ennoble society for the present, means race deterioration in the future. Say the same writers:

Apparently, for a time we can shift a great part of the burdens of the country on to women, who can undersell their husbands and brothers and we probably effect thereby a distinct temporary improvement in our own generation, for a woman of better education and character can always be secured for a lower rate of pay; but we are devouring our one essential form of life capital, female humanity and the process must end in disaster.

A man may be a hard worker in industrial or political fields and at the same time the father of a robust and numerous family. On the contrary; a woman's "essential function is motherhood," and participation in industrial or political activity invariably interferes with this function.

It is not a mere coincidence that the women whose names are best known and most distinguished for social, artistic and literary services were for the most part unmarried or childless, so that the special gifts which brought them fame died with them.

So much, then, for the voice of the pessimist. We must admit that there is force in these arguments and that some of the dangers referred to are real dangers, but the spirit of the new optimism affirms that all these difficulties as they arise will be successfully met by the unconquerable power of the human mind, as others have been met before. There may be, it is true, no more rich unoccupied lands to the westward, but scientific agriculture is showing that there are almost infinite unoccupied possibilities in the soil under our feet. Malthus's law of