The Meaning of Evolution Part 8

Weissman and his co-workers have contended that this unaided principle will serve. Most biologists have asked for some more efficient cause, and a.s.sert that selection does not account for the appearance of variations, but only for their preservation, and that any valid theory of evolution must show how variations originate. It is chiefly in this respect that Darwin's work has failed to satisfy many later biologists. When we hear a scientist speak of Darwinism as being dead, this is what he means. He does not think evolution false, but believes that Natural Selection is not sufficient to account for evolution.

There are three main difficulties involved in Darwin's theory. The chief defect lies in the fact that selection cannot originate varieties. In all his earlier works Darwin simply accepted variations as he found them. He was content to say that all species varied constantly, and in every direction. He gave no theory to account for variation. Whenever he took measurements of the dimensions of any large series of objects of the same kind he found these measurements to vary, apparently, in all directions. Upon the facts of these variations, and without accounting for them, he built his own theory of evolution. He realized his weakness, and acknowledged it in his book. He probably did not antic.i.p.ate how insistently later biologists would demand an explanation that would account for this variation. In his later work, responding to this criticism, Darwin originated a theory which he called Pangenesis. He believed that when an adult animal had responded to his environment and acquired a new character he could transmit this character to his offspring. At that time no one doubted this fact. The whole theory of Lamarck was based on the a.s.sumption that this could be done. Darwin suggested that every organ of the body threw off minute particles, which he called pangenes.

These little bodies, carried by the blood, were taken up by the egg cells or sperm cells, and the latter cells determined the future development. Consequently, the character of the new individual was determined by the parental pangenes. In this way the gain acquired by one generation could be pa.s.sed on to the next. This theory was purely speculative. He never pretended that there was the faintest corroborating evidence visible to the microscope in the organ, in the blood, or in the germ cell. It was not an accounting for what is, but for what it seemed possible to him might be.

This theory of Pangenesis, in the shape in which Darwin promulgated it, has dropped out of consideration almost entirely. DeVries of recent years has revised it, but with distinct modifications, and most biologists pay no attention to it.

There is a school of biologists, headed by Weissman, who have come to be known as Neo-Darwinians. These men have insisted that Natural Selection, if properly understood and developed, is quite sufficient to account for the fact of evolution, including the appearance of variations. Weissman himself is a microscopist of more than common skill. He is thoroughly accomplished in the most modern methods of killing, fixing, staining, and mounting. This worker's acquaintance with the intimate structure of the cell is probably as great as that of any other man in the world. Weissman a.s.serts that he has seen inside the nucleus all the machinery necessary to explain how the father hands over his qualities to his children. He insists, equally strongly, that this process is such that no father can hand to his child any qualities which he himself did not have at least in potentiality at his birth. Everything the individual acquires during his lifetime is his own possession, which he may use and develop to the utmost extent, but it dies with him. His children, born after he possesses it, can no more inherit it than those born before. Weissman expressed this in his famous statement that "There is no inheritance of acquired characters." The biological world has had no shock equal to this since Darwin's time, and there are few other questions to which scientists to-day return with such constant vigor.

If what Weissman says is true, that no variation or development which comes to an animal during his lifetime can be transferred into his own germ cells and handed on to his children, then it becomes evident that we must find some cause of variation that acts within the germ cells.

This is the difficulty which Weissman meets. He says that there are small particles in the nucleus of each cell; that these particles which he calls determinants decide the form and the course of development of that cell; that when that cell divides to produce another cell it gives to this other cell one-half of each determinant.

As a result the second cell grows to be like the first. This tells us why offspring are like their parents. There is nothing in the theory thus far to show us why offspring are not exactly like their parents.

In other words, there is no accounting, thus far in the theory, for variation. When the biologist studies carefully the history of an egg while it is being formed, he sees that at one stage in its development it throws away not one-half of each determinant, but one-half of the determinants. When an egg does this, it deliberately casts aside one-half of the possibilities of its own development. This throwing away is quite as effective for all its descendants. Any ancestral quality now lost is lost from the line forever. In the formation of the sperm cell set free by the male a similar throwing away of one-half the characters has taken place. The egg cell and the sperm cell fuse together. There are as many possibilities now as there were in either parent, but not all the potentialities of both parents. Half the possibilities of each have been thrown away, and hence cannot appear in the offspring. By this constant process we get, in every generation, new combinations of qualities. This is the main cause, says Weissman, for variations.

There is, however, another possible cause. Each cell has enough determinants in it for many individuals, and it seems to be more or less a matter of accident which qualities shall come out. It has been suggested that as an egg lies within the gland, a blood vessel may bring blood to it in such way that a determinant, lying in a certain position in the egg, may get the richest supply of blood, and hence develop at the expense of the less nourished determinant. By these two methods variation comes into an animal's life, if Weissman and his school are to be believed.

This is a serious blow, if true, to many theories of evolution. The great ma.s.s of evolutionists still feel that somehow there is an influence by which the environment produces variation. How the influences of the surrounding world can get down into the body of the parent and affect the egg is unknown. This is freely confessed by every biologist. All are agreed that Weissman's work has made us cautious, and prevented our lightly accepting a belief in the influence of the environment. Yet it is felt by many that slowly and gradually, in the long run, the germ is affected in the same manner as is the body of the parent. In other words, even those who are not followers of Weissman, have accepted the idea that there is little inheritance of acquired characters. Yet they return to the belief that somehow, in some way as yet unexplainable, the main cause for variation in animals lies in the situation in which they live, and tends toward better adaptation to that situation.

Whether men with this conviction are merely reactionaries whose confidence is returning, or bold thinkers whose views will ultimately prevail, time alone can tell.

A second strong objection was brought against the theory of Natural Selection. Darwin declared that small variations in favorable directions are selected and become the starting point of new and better things. It is soon seen, however, that the effect of unaided Natural Selection would be but to mix new departures with the old forms, and soon swamp out any progressive tendency. Whenever a genius appeared, instead of finding a corresponding genius with which to pair, it mated with the average of its own species. Hence its offspring were nearer the average than it was, and their offspring still nearer. Thus whatever advantage the genius originally possessed gradually sank into the common level.

It was Moritz Wagner, a German naturalist, who first insisted that if favorable variations were to amount to anything these possessors must not only mate with others of their same kind, but must also be prevented from mating with the old average group. Accordingly, the belief arose that, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, variations returned to the common level. Wherever a varying group became separated by any barrier from mating with the rest of its species, and had only its own kind to pair with, a new species sprang up. This barrier might be a desert, or an impa.s.sable mountain range, an arm of the sea, or anything else that the animal could not, or would not, cross. Isolated in this way, the little group that had an advantage in a different direction could develop its tendencies, and a new species would be made of what had been previously only a geographical race. In this matter of geographical isolation Wagner is very strongly supported by the American zoologist, David Starr Jordan, who believes that no two closely related species of animals ever occupied the same geographical area. Both Wagner and Jordan are ardent admirers of Darwin and his theory of natural selection, but both believe that it is necessary to add the idea of isolation in order to make natural selection effective.

George John Romanes, a British naturalist, has added to Wagner's idea of isolation, the expanded conception that there may be isolations that are not geographical. For this phase, Romanes has coined the term physiological isolation. Something in the structure or habit of the animals with the new variation prevents them from mating with the older type. Occasionally it is a difference in the structure of the reproductive organs themselves. This, however, is not the only possible divergence. The mating season in one group may come earlier than that of the other, or may come during the day, while the main group is in the habit of mating at night. Anything which keeps some members of a species separate in their mating from the rest, will result in the course of a longer or shorter time, says Romanes, in the formation of a new species.

A third great objection was raised against Darwinism. The theory said that only useful variations were selected by nature. It was a.s.serted by objectors that the earliest beginnings of any variation must be too slight to be useful, or as the term went, to have selective value.

It has been noticed by a number of naturalists that certain animals seem to carry the development of a peculiarity altogether too far. It is seen for instance that in the Irish Elk, which has for some time been extinct, the horns were so enormous as to be a source of danger rather than of a.s.sistance to their owner. It was said that the tendency to produce heavy horns had gained, as it were, a sort of momentum, and that this impulse had carried the development beyond a safe limit. The Irish Elk became extinct because his horns were too heavy. During the Mesozoic period the reptiles grew too large. They seemed to have carried size to a point at which it became a danger instead of a help. They completely pa.s.sed out of existence, leaving behind them only very much smaller reptiles.

Eimer, of Germany, has based on facts like these his theory of Orthogenesis. He says that variations in animals are not indefinite and in every direction, but that they follow along clear and definite lines. These lines, in the case of the elk and of the Mesozoic reptiles, developed too far, but ordinarily the effect of such a tendency is distinctly beneficial to the animal. It particularly a.s.sists in carrying on for a time the variations which have not yet become useful to the animal. It has always been difficult on Darwinian principles to understand how the beginnings of the useful variations could be selected before they were strong enough to be of actual value to the animal. This tendency to variations in certain directions instead of at random would account for such early development. This theory of Orthogenesis has not figured very strongly in the history of the movement, but it recurs at intervals.

Both in America and France there is a constant tendency on the part of zoologists to return to the Lamarckian idea that it is the use of an organ that develops it, its disuse that makes it fade away. This is undoubtedly true of the individual, and although Weissman insists that it is useless to the species as a whole, many zoologists are slow to relinquish entirely the idea that somehow these favorable developments become reproduced in the offspring.

Professor Cope, the American paleontologist, was a strong believer in the effect of activity, both upon the individual and upon his descendants. He believed that the insistent beating of the foot of an animal upon the hard soil of the drying Tertiary plateau, had influenced the production of a firmer nail, which spread around the entire end of the toe and made the hoof of the ungulate. He believed that the use of the teeth in grinding produced a stronger and better molar tooth, and that the offspring shared in this advantage. Since Weissmann's time, however, every Lamarckian feels it necessary to suggest some method by which the altered body of the parent can produce modifications in the germ plasms from which the young are to spring. One of our later biologists begins to talk of some effect comparable with wireless telegraphy or induced electricity. He believes that organs in the adult, not necessarily by direct action, but by action from a distance, may alter the germ. Of this, there is no proof at present. Others have suggested that just as the ductless glands pour into the blood chemical substances which materially affect the growth and development of other portions of the body, so similar enzymes, or other chemical substances, may be sent into the blood, which subsequently bathes the germ cells of the coming generation and produces the change. But of this, again, there is no proof. We may believe that acquired characters are transmitted, but we certainly do not have a very clear idea as to how it can be done.

One of the strongest objections to Darwin's idea of evolution by natural selection of small and favorable variations, is that the process is too inconceivably slow to account for the enormous progress which has been made. The answer has always been that our observation ran back so short a time that we really have no clear idea of how rapid evolution may have been. Again, it has been answered that transitional geological periods, in which there is much change in the physical geography of a country, will produce more rapid evolution than we at present are experiencing.

Hugo DeVries, of Amsterdam, believes he has found the answer to this difficulty. Outside of his botanical garden an American species of Evening Primrose had run wild. In looking over a number of these plants he found, every here and there, certain peculiar members of the species. They differed noticeably to the practiced eye from the rest of the group. When they were planted and crossed with each other, and the resulting seeds were again planted, the peculiarity remained constant in all the members of the collection. Here then we have a true variation, not large in amount, but at the same time quite definite, and which from the first remains true. Here are the beginnings, says DeVries, of new species. They are true from the first; they can live among other members of the species and still come true; they do not need isolation, at least in Wagner's geographical sense. These forms DeVries calls mutations. It is his thought that a species may run along uniformly for a long time when, from some cause which he has not determined as yet, instability comes into the species and it varies in quite a number of directions. Each of these variations may be the starting point of a new species. DeVries believes that he has at least half a dozen mutants of his new Evening Primrose.

This theory of Mutation has been eagerly seized upon by many botanists. The zoologists have not accepted it quite so enthusiastically. If this is the chief method by which species transform, it seems strange that we do not find more mutations than we do. Perhaps we do not look carefully enough; perhaps we shall find them a little later. Just at present it seems premature to believe that all evolution is by mutation, although quite possibly some of it is. The main apparent advantage of mutation is that it hastens the time in which a new species may arise.

There are certain difficulties which run back into the problem, and which must first be reasonably solved before a clear understanding of the idea of evolution is possible. The first of these is as to the nature of life. What is life? The reply of the biologist will probably be that so far as its material side is concerned, it must be answered in terms of physics and chemistry. As to any side not material, if it have any such side, science says that the chemist can have nothing to say. The chemist may have an opinion of his own based on some other ground than his chemistry, but so far as he is a chemist, he has no opinion. The chemical side of life is being very carefully and very fully investigated. We are certainly being brought nearer to the borders of the living substance. We are rapidly gaining fuller knowledge of the physical and chemical processes which const.i.tute life, or with which life is always a.s.sociated. If we gain this knowledge we shall be in better position to solve many of our other problems. Even then there is a problem which preceded and which will possibly always defy solution. How did life originate? Has it developed out of chemical and physical activities which we know as heat, light or electricity? If so, what were the conditions under which it developed? If we understand the nature of life, and the conditions under which it developed, we may be able to produce it at will.

A few scientists may hope dimly that this will be attained. I suspect a great majority believe it to be impossible, and that the question as to whether life evolved upon this planet, or this planet became infected with life through meteoric dust from some other center, will forever remain an unsolved problem.

CHAPTER X

THE FUTURE EVOLUTION OF MAN

The disturbance of mind created by the publication of Charles Darwin's "Origin of Species" would have amounted to nothing if the theory had been applied to the lower animals alone. Few people would have disputed that a cow and a buffalo had descended from the same ancestor, or that monkeys and apes were of a common blood. The whole theory would have been looked upon by those outside the biological world as entirely an academic question, in which they had little concern, and less interest. But within this century the scientist has so persuaded the world of the unity underlying the activities of the universe, that so soon as a principle is established men begin to run it out to the very end. Everyone knows perfectly well that if it could be proved that the dog and the horse had a common ancestor, still more if it could be made apparent that the dog and the frog and fish had sprung from the same stock, then there could be no question of what would be the final application of the theory. Man himself could be no exception to the law. So the battle dropped at once upon this most interesting point, and around this center the contest has waged.

What is the origin of man? Who are his ancestors? As soon as we ask the question there is no doubt whatever as to the answer, if we accept the principle of evolution. Our only means of judging relations.h.i.+p between animals is by the similarity of their structure. As soon as we come to examine the other creatures even in the most cursory fas.h.i.+on, there is only one group which in any close degree resembles the human species. Our nearest relatives among living animals must undoubtedly be the apes. Some little distance farther away stand the monkeys, and, structurally speaking, there is more difference between a monkey and an ape than there is between an ape and man. The gap between man and his relatives of this group, known as the primates, is a mental, not a physical one. While his brain and his mind have developed far beyond theirs, the rest of his body is comparatively close to that of an ape.

Probably no one can face the possibility of his being descended from creatures not unlike the ape, without feeling a stirring sense of repugnance. The least aristocratic of us hesitates to name in the line of his ancestry creatures so unlike himself as the members of this group. It seems to us impossible that we should have descended from creatures as lowly as they. If evolution is true, these are among our near ancestors. Back of the group of primates lies a far less developed set of insectivorous animals, behind them the reptiles, behind them the fishes. When we get back this far we are less certain but most probably the worms take up the story. So our ancestry runs back to the very beginning, when it originated in the one-celled animals which are also the ancestors of all the rest of the animal world. If we are inclined to deny our ancestors in the trees, what shall we say of our forefathers in the seas?

The question of course is not to be decided by our likes or our dislikes. If the evolution of man is true it will not make it less true because the process is not to our liking. It is our part, if this be the truth, to accept it as we do any other truth. Surely those of us who are moral of thought are not willing to disbelieve a truth because it is unpleasant.

The newness of the idea is the chief reason for our dislike of it.

This lowliness of origin should not be distasteful to us. Nothing about Abraham Lincoln seems to us more wonderful than that a man who towered head and shoulders above his generation, indeed above most generations of men, in his fineness of life, in his n.o.bility of purpose, in the integrity of his aims, should have been of exceedingly humble extraction. It only adds to the glory of his later achievements that he should have lived in a cabin, have spent his young manhood splitting rails and running a flat-boat, and have gained his education almost unaided from a few books and much meditation in front of a log fire.

That the greatest military General on the Union side of the Civil war should have been the son of a country tanner, and as a boy, not over-shrewd in the matter of bargains, adds to the glory of his later life. The simplicity of his childhood gives new l.u.s.ter to the power with which he led the forces of a nation to victory, and then went to a battle no less n.o.ble in his long fight for honor while suffering from disease and approaching death. Why then should we feel that such beginnings in the lower world are too humble for man? Why do we think his present superiority diminished by his lowly origin? Why can we not see that precisely the reverse is true? The more humble the level from which he sprang the more gloriously creditable is his present position. Instead of being ashamed of having risen from the brute, it should be the glory of man that he has so sprung. His chief superiority lies in the fact that while they have remained where they are, he has so completely outdistanced them as to have placed a gap between himself and them that seems almost impa.s.sable. Furthermore, if man with his present glory of intellect and of moral impulse, has sprung from a creature whose superiority to the ape lay chiefly in its potentialities, then it does not yet appear what he shall be. We can judge the future only by the past. Through the long ages the development has been very slow. Through the last hundred thousand years the development of man has been wonderfully rapid, compared with what went before, though it seems slow enough when we look at it from the standpoint of our historical and traditional reports. But with this added impulse, this rapid improvement that has come with the development of mind instead of muscle, of tooth and of claw, we have every promise of an evolution that shall far surpa.s.s anything that has yet come. To-day our leaders are way beyond the average of the ma.s.s.

Who shall doubt that in a not too distant to-morrow, the ma.s.ses shall be where the leaders of to-day now are. We shall not then have reached a dead level of superiority. Our leaders will have moved on as rapidly as have the ma.s.ses, and will be as far ahead of them then as they are now. It shall be their work to apprehend new virtues, and to work them out in their lives. The ma.s.ses, seeing the beauty of the lives of the leaders, recognizing in those lives the revelation of the divine power which they have apprehended, will hunger to learn of them and to lead lives like theirs. To this process who shall set an end? The advance is slow, as in all evolution; but anyone who wishes to do so may easily detect the direction of the current.

The evolution of man's physical frame probably has nearly ceased.

Gradually organs that are useless to him are pa.s.sing away. Slowly his hands are becoming more delicate and refined and skilled. But his evolution has begun to work itself out on entirely other lines. We sometimes hear that the men of the past were the full equivalent of the men of to-day. Scholars like to tell us that the population of Athens was finer in quality than any population that has existed since. We must remember that group after group of men may be expected to specialize intellectually and fail to develop morally and physically. Under these conditions this little branch of the human race runs through its forced flowering and comes to an end. With the study of history and the earnest investigation of these lives of the past, new possibilities arise within the human family. The next race that flowers may take longer to decay because it understands better the weaknesses that carried away the preceding civilization. In time there will arise a civilization that understands the past. A whole people will some time realize that intellectual development alone will not save it, or Athens would have lasted; that moral development alone will not suffice, or Judaea had been permanent; that physical development will not serve, or Sparta would stand to-day. Some day there will arise a nation that will see to it that every intellectual advance is accompanied by an equivalent moral and physical advance.

When this time comes we shall have a race which can survive. Are we to be that race? The sins of man are generally the dregs of his brute ancestry. b.e.s.t.i.a.lity of life was once common enough to attract no attention. Kings and n.o.bles were not supposed to be clean so long as they confined their b.e.s.t.i.a.l relations to those below them in rank.

Gradually men are becoming ashamed of uncleanness in life. Some day there will be no difference so far as purity of life is concerned, between the two who present themselves at the altar asking the blessing of G.o.d on their union.

If anyone doubts that English speaking people are becoming cleaner of life he needs only to consult the literature of the past. No one dreams of finding fault with Chaucer because his stories related in the company of men and women often would not bear such telling to-day.

Shakespeare, with all his wonderful genius, needs expurgating if one would read him aloud comfortably to a mixed audience. And these are the s.h.i.+ning stars. When we drop below them, the literature of their time becomes nearly impossible to read. Fielding and Smollett and Stern helped to build up the English novel, but the stories they tell speak of the grossness of their time in language that is unmistakable.

We are by no means clean to-day. A fair proportion of our novels leave much to be desired. The stage is the scene of much we could wish to see cleaner. Above all this grossness there towers a sweetness and beauty of thought, and an earnestness of purpose, a sincerity of effort, which makes the present time fuller of moral purpose, fuller of the desire to be clean and to help others to be clean, than graced any previous period in the history of either England or America.

Under the change from country to city life man has suffered. Here too evolution is necessary. City life tells hard on the second generation and nearly destroys the third; but we have come to understand the difficulty and are fast remedying it. It is more than possible that the next generation will see such changes in the life of the worker in the great center, as shall effectively stop the physical deterioration that has come to the city dweller. G.o.d grant that modern civilization has had teaching enough and learned its lesson well enough. G.o.d grant further that we may give over slaughtering our most ambitious and vigorous young men in battle to settle questions which battle can never settle. G.o.d grant that we have come to a turning of the ways where the life of men, women and children, no matter how humble their station, shall stand higher in value than the profits of any commercial venture. G.o.d grant that we will soon be firm enough to declare that a business which can only live by sacrificing the health and strength of the workers must be counted an unprofitable business, and be allowed to cease. G.o.d grant finally that the American people may learn from the past to guard against a like fate in the future; that here may be the people whose strength, intelligence and uprightness shall lead the world; not for the sake of exceeding the world, but with the high mission of setting to the world an example of what can come to a vigorous, free and G.o.d-fearing people.

In the early history of the evolution of man the struggle almost always concerns the individual. Gradually the family comes to be the fuller unit. Only that is success which leads to the success of this higher group. After a time the family broadens to the tribe, and then the tribe to the nation. The evolution of social inst.i.tutions is at present going on at an enormously rapid rate. Throughout the civilized world democracy is coming to its own. Even where the form of monarchy still prevails, the subjects of the monarch are having more and more rights. The people of England are surely as free as are the people of the United States. Increasingly all forms of government will secure for all their subjects, no matter what their station in life, a fair share of the general prosperity. In this field, human evolution is perhaps more rapid than in any other.

Any individual human being is a network of traits and peculiarities.

He has all the ordinary attributes of humanity, but to the whole complex he gives an individual peculiarity which is totally his own.

Where did he get his qualities? In the earlier times the fairies were supposed to have blessed him or cursed him in his cradle. A later age saw in the stars the rulers of man's destiny. He was jovial, or saturnine, or martial, depending on the planet which was in the ascendant at the time of his birth. Now we know "it is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." Everything a man is comes to him from within or from without; from nature or from nurture; from his heredity or from his environment. From our ancestors we get all the possibilities of our lives. To a certain extent we are slaves to our heredity, but not by any means to any such extent as to make us hopeless, unless our heredity is miserably bad. To the great ma.s.s of us come larger potentialities than we ever develop, and such possibilities of degradation as, fortunately, few of us ever reach.

Within an enormously wide range, man is the architect of his own fortune. Only such traits develop as find a stimulus in the environment. Accordingly, a very large proportion of the development a man may achieve depends upon the circ.u.mstances under which he is placed, or, what is far more to the point, in which he may place himself. Man is not the blind sport of a relentless destiny. It is his to choose his environment; it is his to modify his environment when he cannot leave it. To an extent which no other animal has ever approached, man is the arbiter of his own destiny. A hypothetical a.s.s may stand helpless between two equidistant bales of hay, but no human being is ever so helpless a sport of his environment. As it is, he may drift or he may rove as he pleases. To one man the current may be stronger than to another. There may be now and then a child so feeble-minded as to be unable to decide the course of its own life. It will not be long before society will see to it that such a life leaves behind it no strain cursed with its fatal weakness. In this effort to advance, man has all the advantage that comes from concentrated social effort. No man may live to himself. To every man in our community who desires it, a helping hand will be stretched. Often a hand will be stretched to him and he will be steadied whether he will or not, until his own will reforms itself and gains the mastery.

Inasmuch as all that is in man comes from his environment or from his heredity, the only way in which the race of men can be advanced is by improving their environment or by bettering their heredity. The first of these is the province of the sociologist; the second that of the eugenist. The sociologist has for some time been giving his careful attention to the improvement of the environment. In every large city, a man must build for himself a house fit to live in, if he build it at all. Whether he erects it for himself or for another makes no difference. Society will no longer allow him to build a home which is a detriment to the one who lives in it. Not only must he make himself a decent home but he must keep it in decent condition. The community will not allow him to endanger his own health, or that of his neighbor, by an insufficient method of attending to his garbage, or by a lack of ordinary cleanliness. If he will not clean his premises himself, the law sees to it that they are cleaned for him. Already we are beginning to understand that no man has a right to employ another man or woman or child at wages which are not sufficient to maintain the one thus employed. The wages of many people are exceedingly meager, notably those of women and children. He can read but ill the signs of the times who does not foresee an early end to the exploiting of the labor of these helpless creatures. Humanity has determined firmly that these things must pa.s.s, that the young child must not labor long or hard, that a woman must not be taxed beyond her strength. Already in England there is a partially successful movement which will doubtless spread to this country to provide that a woman be granted a little time before and after the birth of her child during which she shall not be allowed to suffer because her power to earn a wage is temporarily gone. These things cannot fail in the long run to strengthen the people. They strengthen chiefly the present generation.

The blight of the fact that acquired characters cannot be transmitted, meets us here. This improved environment can only slowly, if at all, improve the race, and every effort made in this direction must be repeated with each generation.

Under such circ.u.mstances is it to be wondered at that the eugenist is hoping to raise the strain? Any improvement he can bring about is not only valuable for the generation in which it comes but is carried on into the generations which follow. This is the hope that strengthens and sustains him in his effort. The science of eugenics is so new, so little is surely known concerning the transmission of human characters, that no one is able as yet wisely to say what course is to be pursued in improving the race. But the problem is so interesting and its outcome so overwhelmingly important that men will never cease striving to know, and may, before many years, begin wisely to guide us in our efforts to provide a finer stock.

Heretofore our efforts at improving the strain have been confined to cattle, chickens and plants. An almost unalterable repugnance rises as soon as we speak of improving the human strain. Visions, if not stories, start up at once, of experimental matings of human beings, and of all other unspeakable abominations which no decent man expects to happen or even wishes to attempt. If there is one thing in human society the value of which has been demonstrated through the unending ages, it is the monogamic marriage. All ideal workers must point to the life-long union of a strong, vigorous, clean-minded and clean-lived man with a similarly fine, strong, clean-minded and clean-lived woman. Such an ideal may be slow in its attainment, but he aims too low who aims to secure anything less than this. The long struggle out of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity into pure monogamy has been so slow, so gradual, so n.o.ble in its attainments, and is still so far from perfection, that it would be an inconceivably stupid blunder to let go a single point that has been gained. Whether divorce shall be allowed to remedy a mistake may be a matter of dispute, but at best it is a bad remedy for a mistake that should never have been made. No ideal society could ever consider divorce as any permanent portion of its activities. Children are not like cattle. It is not simply a question of their being brought into the world sound and strong. Their long infancy which in the biological as well as in the legal sense, lasts until they are grown up, should be spent in surroundings which can minister, by example and precept, to moral and intellectual development. Surely no such end can possibly be attained when man and woman mate lightly, to part quickly.

At first sight it would seem a wise thing to require health certificates for those who would be married. I doubt not the Chicago Bishop who declined to marry his paris.h.i.+oners except under such conditions, will exert a beneficial effect upon the country by the attention he thus attracts to the subject. It would be a bad day for the city if all the clergy and all the other authorities who are authorized to solemnize marriage should take this step. We have not yet arrived at such a stage of development that a marriage certificate is essential to mating, and a restriction of this sort would simply mean that there could be no legitimate union except of those in strong health. To the burden of ill health would be added the still worse handicap of an illegitimate parentage, with all its bitter train of scorn and shame. Accordingly, it must be possible before the law for those who are not thoroughly vigorous to marry. But, year by year, we may come nearer accomplis.h.i.+ng a finer mating by the aims and purposes we foster in the growing generation. Marriages will never be worth while when they are not freely entered into by the contracting parties. Choice must be free and unrestricted if it is to last for life; but this does not mean that it must be unguarded. It would be bitter folly for parents to leave to their children, without attempt to influence or restrain, the making of their marriages. The mating of our children must be inspired, not directed.

There is one taint from which society has the right and the duty of freeing itself, so far as in its power lies. This is the taint of feeble-mindedness. Of all the calamities that can befall a human being, feeble-mindedness is, perhaps, the worst. From most misfortunes it is possible to recover; with most of the rest one may exist without detriment to the race. To be feeble-minded simply means to hark back to the level of our animal ancestors, without regaining their power to guide life. The animal is provided with a bundle of instincts which tell him what to do in all the ordinary emergencies of life. The human species, in its development, has lost a large portion of its instincts, and has gained, instead, the power of intelligent choice and the ability to learn by imitation. When these drop away, man without his instincts or his intelligence is more helpless than the brute. Students of sociology are making clear to us that a large portion of the criminality of the world, much of the looseness of life, and a large part of the alcoholic excesses are due to this taint of feeble-mindedness. Recent investigations have made it clear that one feeble-minded family in a community may, in the course of years, poison the life of an entire state. The Jukes family in New York, the Kallikak family in New Jersey, have shown the awful possibilities of descent from a single feeble-minded ancestor. Prisons, almshouses, and houses of shame owe their population in no small degree to this bitter curse. It will not be long before society will learn to protect itself against such poisoning of the human stock. Nothing is more clear to the investigator of this subject than that the one overwhelming cause for feeble-mindedness is feeble-mindedness in the parentage.

There is one type of mental weakling, known as the Mongolian idiot, which may arise right out of the heart of an apparently sound family.

But the number of these is comparatively small. The number of feeble-minded, who are feeble-minded because of their heredity, is dishearteningly and astonis.h.i.+ngly large. Every attempt to examine large numbers of school children shows a sickening proportion of those who are distinctly feeble. Every little community seems to have its boy or girl who is what is known as silly. Such people rarely live long lives without leaving behind them feeble-minded children, no small proportion of whom are likely to be illegitimate. Against this fouling of the stream at its source, society must protect itself.

Legislators revolt at the somewhat inhuman but certainly safe method of surgically preventing the possibility of the feeble-minded becoming parents. It would be more creditable and just as effective if society would take upon itself the tremendously expensive task of caring for all its feeble-minded in inst.i.tutions during their entire life. The cost would be large for a generation, but would rapidly diminish and eventually become small. It certainly would be the humane way. These people in good inst.i.tutions are by no means unhappy. Within the limit of their capacities they can do many things. Wise management usually will secure from them labor enough of wholesome and simple kind nearly to pay for their own support. Nothing could be better for them than to till the soil, care for the cattle, tend the chickens, and, in this way, provide very largely the materials on which they are fed. How this problem shall work out, time only can decide. With it once worked out, there is no doubt that the level of humanity will be distinctly raised. No other one feature in the program of eugenics seems more absolutely hopeful than this.