Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Current Economic Affairs (1924).pdf/189

Rh An efficient agency of production may temporarily fall into difficulty. Laissez faire would say “‘let it fail,” but rather do we nurse it back to economic health. A genius among men falls sick. Laissez faire would say “let him die’ but instead of that we send him to a hospital and try to preserve his usefulness to the world. These things are manifestly desirable. We may even use such powers to preserve the unfit for long times.

Nevertheless we are not nullifying the natural law, which in the end is going to show that it operates immutably and inevitably. Nature is not safely to be flouted. Science tells us simply what it is and what are its laws. Sociologists in trying to abolish the woes of man are commonly ignorant or disregardful of his nature. His nature is subject to the great natural law of heredity. Why it should be so we know no more than the wherefore of the law of gravitation. Simply it is. Ignorance of this law, which has been learned in but recent times, has been the source of immeasurable damage to the human race and its civilization.

The biologists tell us convincingly that the mental capacity of men is a function of heredity, not of environment, and that there are great differences among them. No improvement in surroundings and no process of training can convert a moron into a genius. Intellect of the order of genius is inconceivably rare and is an endowment of nature. The psychologists tell us that tests of the recruits for the army, a large sampling of American youth, showed a relatively low degree of mentality on the whole. The majority did not possess the capacity to pass successfully through the course of the standard high school. These much dis-