dren of the next generation. Were the effects of education inherited, human evolution should be rapid, but it has been slow; how slow perhaps few of us realize. We speak with pride of the advance of human civilization, of our progress in the arts and in useful knowledge, of the improvement in morals and the growth of altruism, and this all makes us blind to the fact that since the dawn of history there has been no clearly recognizable evolution of mankind. We reach larger results in the problem of life than did our progenitors five thousand years ago, but we are able to do so because we build upon their experience and that of all the generations between.
Have we much greater innate powers? Are we at birth endowed with characters having much higher possibilities and much higher tendencies physically, intellectually and morally? Have we to-day men of much greater physical prowess than the ancient conquerors of the world, than the builders who constructed the monuments of Egypt? Have we more adventurous spirits or more successful explorers than the Phoenicians, who without compass sailed the ancient seas, reaching the whole Atlantic coast of Europe and the British Isles, also passing southward even around the tip of Africa? Are there among us to-day men of keener inventive genius than the one who first used fire, or the inventor of the lever or of the wheel or than the man who first made bronze or smelted ore? Our modern engines have been invented screw by screw by successive builders, each building upon the others' work. Have we to-day men of much larger legal and social understanding than the ancient lawgivers who forged the legal systems which still are the basis of our most enlightened governments? Have we poets whose genius greatly transcends that of Homer, or of the authors of the books of Job and Ruth? In esthetic appreciation, and in the power of artistic expression in sculpture and architecture, we are degenerate compared with the Greeks.
Even in innate moral character have we greatly advanced? We are learning the lesson of altruism, but are we born with a sturdier moral sense? If we could take a hundred thousand infants from London or Chicago and, turning back the wheel of time, place them in the homes of ancient Babylon, would they reach a higher standard of righteousness or of altruism than their neighbors? How little evidence we have of real evolution of mankind since the first emergence of the race from the darkness of prehistoric times!
But though we accept the statement that innate human character can not be improved by the direct inheritance of the effects of culture, there still remains to us the eugenic method of procedure, which, if it can wisely be applied, may result in improvement in the stirp, in the real essential innate character. This is an ideal that fires the imagination—the breeding of a race that shall be strong and wholesome, physically, intellectually and morally; men who shall be decent because they are inherently decent, not because by training they restrain their evil tendencies; a race from whose fundamental character the evil tendencies are actually removed. This is a social ideal higher even than was apparently present to the mind of Jesus.
Is this ideal—of a race of inherently wholesome men—utterly chimerical, or is there a way of approaching it? No positive, indubitable answer can now be given to this question, for scientific study of heredity has not yet given us extensive knowledge of the biological, especially of the psychological phenomena of inheritance.
