Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/274

270 repeat what is said every day by individual men. This does not imply that the lower man or the lower race need be robbed, enslaved or exterminated. Nor that a lower race may not produce its own prophets or scholars or heroes. The tribe of Australian bushmen is counted one of the lowest on earth. Not long ago I met in Adelaide, a full-blooded "Black-fellow," broad-minded and competent, a mechanical engineer by profession, a man who would hold his own in any community. That race is lowest which shows, on the whole, least capacity for self-elevation.

"All men are born free and equal," it is asserted, but such equality is political only. It can not be biological. In every race are certain strains having capacities not attainable by the mass. There should be equality of start, equality before the law, but there will always be differences of attainment. The gifts of potentiality, unit characters of the germ-plasm, are not shared by all people of the same race. The average status of one may be below that of another, and the highest possibilities of one type may be greater than that of another. In general, the highest range of possibilities in every field has been reached by the "blonde races" of Europe. Groups of less individual or of less aggregate achievement may properly be regarded as "lower."