Most of the degeneration so cleverly treated by Nordau is purely the result of defects in the life of the individual, in his relation to his environment, and the course of action by which his character is formed. Without going into a detail for which I have neither space nor ability, I may say that the development of mysticism, symbolism, "hearts insurgent," and general mental and moral vagabondage is caused by the lack of sober living and of wholesome work, the lack of motor ideals and of outlet for effort.

Causes of decadence.

In the cities of Europe the common man has risen to a life of larger possibilities and greater opportunities for success and failure without adequate training for such activity. Society is like a band of schoolboys in charge of a railway train. They know not what to do nor how to do it, and are more interested in present enjoyment than in the success of any enterprise intrusted to them. Small-minded men lost in a multiplicity of impressions are likely to do things which suggest degeneration. If to this we add the wide diffusion of corrosive elements, narcotics, stimulants, impure suggestion, unwholesome living, we have elements which tend toward personal degeneration. As their influences affect many persons alike, they appear as a form of social decadence.

of Europe.

We find, moreover, in Europe, the prevalence of "a strange drooping of spirit." This feeling that civilization is confined in a blind channel, a The despondency cul-de-sac, is a natural result of the great increase of the results of sense-perception without corresponding outlet in action. "Progress," says Edward Alsworth Ross, referring to this condition," seems to have ended in aimless discontent. The schools have produced, according to Bismarck, ten times as many overeducated young men as there are places to

fill. The thirst for culture has produced a great hungry intellectual proletariat. The forces of darkness are still strong, and it seems sometimes as if the middle ages would swallow up everything won by modern struggles. It is true that many alarms have proved false, but it is the steady strain that tells on the mood. It is pathetic to see on the Continent how men fear to face the future. No one has the heart to probe the next decade. The outlook is bounded by the next Sunday in the park or the theatre. The people throw themselves into the pleasures of the moment with desperation of doomed men who hear the ring of the hammer on the scaffold. Ibsen, applying an old sailor's superstition to the European ship of state, tells how one night he stood on the deck and looked down on the throng of passengers, each the victim of some form of brooding melancholy or dark presentiment. As he looked he seemed to hear a voice crying, 'There's a corpse on board!

The record of degeneration in music, in art, in literature, in religion as traced by Nordau, is the record of loss of hope and loss of illusion. In so far as it is honest, not a mere affectation, it is the cry called out by the misery of personal or social decay. It is the expression of mental dyspepsia and physical impotence. It finds a large part of its explanation in the fact that, with the class affected by it, sense-impressions, feelings, and impulses have far outrun the opportunities for action. The cure for this condition is found in ambition, effort, individual development. It is not the swift rush and whirl of modern civilization which has brought all this to pass. It has come rather from attaining the results of this rush* without taking part in its effort.

* A similar thought is expressed by Kant, as quoted by Mark Pattison. Of "Schwärmerei," or philosophical revery, he says: "This mental disease arises from the growth of a class which has

The man of force.

The genuine man, the man who is doing, something, who faces "the world as it is," in absolute veracity of thought and action, is never decadent. Society lives through the effort of those who have power to act beyond what is needed in the common struggle for life. Strength begets strength and wisdom leads to wisdom. "There is always room for the man of force, and he makes room for many." It is the strong, wise, and good of the past who have made civilization possible. It The wholesome is the great human men, the "men in the natural order," that now and for "The earth,”

world.

all time determine the current of life. Emerson tells us, "is upheld by the veracity of good men. They keep the world wholesome."

From all institutions a certain form of degeneration must arise, because all institutions tend in some degree

Degeneration

under institutions.

to do away with individual effort. A common creed for men weakens the force of individual belief. Common ceremonies destroy the spontaneity and personality of the feelings they represent. Right action by statute and convention is in some degree opposed to virtue by personal initiative. Between unregulated individualism or anarchy and all-controlling institutions

not yet thorough science, yet is not wholly ignorant. It has caught up notions on current literature which makes it think itself on the same level of those who have laboriously studied the sciences. I see no other means of checking the mischief, except that the schools should reform their method and restore thorough teaching instead of that teaching of many things which has usurped its place." Thoreau speaks of the derivation of vile" and "villain" from via, way, and villa, village. "This suggests," he says, "that kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them without travelling themselves."

or slavery there must always be a just mean. To find and maintain this just mean from generation to generation is the function of social reform. The reform of the day has been always in the direction of greater personal freedom. "As a snow bank grows where there is a lull in the wind," says Thoreau, "so where there is a lull in the truth, institutions spring up; by and by the truth blows over them and takes them away." All forms of tyranny have their beginning in kindness. Paternalism. in time hardens into oppression and checks the growth of the individual man, who should become responsible to himself and for himself. The intelligence and freedom of one's neighbours, not the force of statute nor the power of arms, are the guarantee of social security.

Causes of pauperism may be found in other forms of giving as well as in those recognised as charity. Mental pauperism is produced when men are given truth instead of being trained to search for it. There are schools which tend to make intellectual paupers instead of training men to think for themselves. There is a moral pauperism induced by the giving of precepts. Right conduct must be individual if it is to have stability. The doing of an honest piece of work honestly may have more force in moral training than a hundred sermons. In like manner spiritual pauperism may be produced by religious instruction. Each man must make his own religion. He must form his own ideals. In the degree that he is religious he must in time become his own high priest, as in the degree that he is effective he must be his own king.

XII.

HEREDITARY INEFFICIENCY.

THIS world is not, on the whole, a hard world to live in if one have the knack of making the proper concessions. Hosts of animals, plants, and

The art of living. men have acquired this knack, and they and their descendants are able to hold their own in the pressure of the struggle for existence. This pressure brings about the persistence of the obedient, those whose activities accord with the demands of their environment. This persistence of the adaptive is known as the survival of the fittest, which has through the ages been the chief element of organic progress. Among men there have always been those to whom the art of living was impossible. This has been the case under ordinary conditions as well as under extraordinary ones. It must be the case with some under any conceivable environment or any circumstances of life. Some variations must tend in the direction of incapacity. This incapacity of one generation, if inborn and not induced by disease or malnutrition, may be handed down by the law of heredity to the next.

In one way or another, in time, most of the incapables are eliminated by the process of natural selection. But not all of them. Our social system is bound too closely. Hereditary incapacity of the few has been in all ages a burden on the many who could take care of