Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/488

484 to-day. Nevertheless, the centuries spent in purging the primitive from the race have contributed to the result. Undoubtedly, too, this agency will continue to operate in the future, although with what modifications it is hard to predict.

Patently it is impossible to weigh statistically the effect of the many criss-cross forces which have molded nations, or to reconstruct with accuracy the historical process. Both the men who perished and the men who survived are now gone beyond recall. It might be suggested that we could make a "control test" by analyzing the mental characters of contemporary savages, who are often said to be close replicas of our own barbarian ancestors. We might, provided we had the psychological method at hand, make enough mental tests to define a type barbarian. In similar wise we might be able to define a civilized type. Then by comparing the two we could determine what were the inherent moral differences between them. But there are unsurmountable difficulties in this procedure. We have not the psychological method as yet to work with, and after the work had been accomplished we could not be sure that the savages whose natures had been charted were in truth identical with the ancients from whom civilized men are sprung. We should, moreover, become entangled in the questions of racial differences—why, for example, some savage peoples, like the Papuans, the Aleuts and the Dyaks, are so amiable, while other savages, such as the North American Indians and the Gonds, are bloodthirsty; or why the ancient Egyptians were apparently less cruel than the ancient Assyrians. In our discussion of selective agencies attention has been directed chiefly to the development of the Aryan peoples.

One test of a logical nature is available. If we grant the validity of socialized selection we find an immediate explanation of the paradox which has puzzled former commentators on the dissimilarities of the classic and modern cultures. We can now understand why it is that there has been an enormous increase of kindliness, of steadiness, of "prescriptive governability," despite the fact that early civilizations were quite as prolific of eminent men of the highest intellectual and moral caliber.

As we said earlier, confusion has been wrought by looking for moral improvement where there has been only moral change. A growth in human meekness may very naturally have been accompanied by a decline in a certain splendid turbulent virility possessed by our ancestors. When this selective instrument made men more sympathetic, it may also have made them less daring. David Starr Jordan remarks: