Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/150

146 of government, too many officials and too little opportunity in the provincial centers, rather than to any fault in the nature of the individual man. Nationalization of effort, whether through socialism or through "efficient organization," must contribute to the spread of "impiegomania."

If the strictures of Demolins be true in any degree, this may be the interpretation. Inferior standards are the work of inferior men. Great men there are in France, and these have persistently turned the nation's face toward the light since Demolins's book was written. War's effect has been to rob France of her due proportion of leaders, but not to dilute or to weaken the message of those who survive. 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, is never a fact. As La Pouge has said:

Another line of criticism of France finds its ablest exponent in Dr. Max Nordau, whose book on "Degeneration" aroused the attention of the world some twenty years ago. Nordau finds abundant evidences of degeneration in the art and literature of every land, all forms of eccentricity, pessimism and perversity being regarded as such. In France, such evidences he finds peculiarly conspicuous. The cause of this condition he ascribes to the inherited strain of an overwrought civilization. "Fin de siècle," "end of the century" is the catch-phrase expressing the weariness, mental, physical and spiritual of a race "tired before it was born." To Nordau, this theory adequately explains all eccentricities of French literature, art, politics or jurisprudence.

But in fact we have no knowledge of the existence of nerve-stress inheritance. In any event, the peasantry of France have not been subjected to it. Their life is hard, but not stressful; and they suffer more from monotony than from any form of enforced nerve-activity. The kind of degeneration Nordau pictures is not a matter of heredity. When not simply personal eccentricity, it is a phase of personal decay. It finds its causes in bad habits, bad training, bad morals, or in the desire to catch public attention for personal advantage. It has no permanence in the blood of the race. The presence on the Paris boulevards of eccentric painters, maudlin musicians, absinthine poets and sensation-mongers, proves nothing as to race degeneracy. When the fashion changes, they will change also. The "end of the century" is past and already the fad of "strenuous life" is blowing them away. Any man of any race withers in an atmosphere of vice, absinthe and opium. The presence of such an atmosphere may be a disheartening symptom, but it is not a proof of national decline. The ghastliest and