other words, a perfectly good region inhabited by perfectly good people may become discouraged, despondent, decadent, owing to nothing more serious than the inheritance of obsolete traditions of agriculture and of social relationships, and to discouragement due to a long continued shrinkage of population.

But just as a discouraged and morally decadent individual may come back to life and to achievement through a personal crisis of some sortthe kindling of a new friendship, religious conversion, or the breaking out of war-so a rural community which is given over to reminiscence and lethargy may, by a proper adjustment of its economic life and a proper stimulus to its civic imagination, begin once more to function with as much exhilaration as the very immigrants and pioneers themselves.'

A third group or series of groups heretofore adjudged our inferiors consists of the primitive peoples and indeed of nearly all of the non-Aryan races. The naïve assumptions of ancient chosen peoples who represented themselves as fertile oases in a human desert of Gentiles, barbarians, and savages, find their counterpart in our time in the orthodox dogma regarding the negro, the views of but a few years ago regarding Mongolians, and the amusing assertions of racial superiority put forth by half the races of Europe, not only in behalf of their common Aryan stock, but of the particular blends of that stock which each associates with its own territory, flag, or mother-tongue.

A recent writer puts the matter thus:

Cultured man has always regarded primitive man as inferior. Europeans have always assumed that the white race was endowed by nature with a superior order of intelligence. This commonly accepted explanation, however, fails to explain. The assumption of superior mental capacity on the part of the white man rests upon the tacit assumption that those peoples are superior which are most advanced in civilization.

It is necessary to distinguish between the possibilities inherent in a people and their actual attainments.

. . . the consensus of scholarly opinion at the present time seems to be to regard the backward races, not only as not having been proven to be inferior in mental ability, but as being, in so far at least as their inherited mental capacity is concerned, substantially equal to the culture races.

Boaz. . . . holds that the differences in civilization are essentially a matter of time and are sufficiently explained by the laws of chance and the general course of historical events.

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Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, 1916, pp. 72-73.

Thomas would seem to find the fundamental explanation of the difference in the mental life of two groups is that the run of attention has been along different lines and in the emergence at fortunate intervals of great personalities. "The most significant fact for Aryan development is the emergence among the Greeks of a number of eminent men who developed logic, the experimental method, and philosophic interest, and fixed in their group the habit of looking behind the incident for the general law." . . . . It would be a simple matter to multiply authorities who hold that in inherent capacity there is an essential mental equality among races and that whatever differences are manifested are explainable solely on the grounds of unequal opportunity.' This view is held not wholly without dissent, of course, but it is very significant that, whereas formerly it could hardly have received a hearing, it now commands the support of a preponderant weight of scholarly opinion.

A final analogy may be sought in the case of women. The dogma of female inferiority, venerable as history itself, is in process of dissipation before our eyes. Like the illusions of a striking and typical difference marking off lawbreakers from law keepers, decadent from vigorous communities, or white from darker-hued races, this illusion is also turning out to have arisen from fixing the attention exclusively on superficial differences which disguise the fundamental human identities lying much nearer to the core of reality.

These examples lead one to inquire whether the obscure, from whom the eugenists anticipate so numerous and dreadful a progeny, are in reality so inferior in endowment to the much lamented low-birth-rate classes, variously eulogized in the persons of officials, business men, teachers, professional men, and college graduates.

Donald Hankey writes in A Student in Arms,

One sees men as God sees them, apart from externals such as manner and intonation. A night in a bombing party shows you Jim Smith as a man of splendid courage. A shortage of rations reveals his wonderful unselfishness. One danger and discomfort after another you share in common till you love him as a brother. Out there, if anyone dared to remind you that Jim was only a fireman while you were a bank clerk, you would give him one in the eye to go on with. You have learned to know a man when you see one and to value him.

E. B. Reuter, "The Superiority of the Mulatto," American Journal of Sociology, July, 1917, pp. 87-88, 92-93.

War and science are alike in this that each makes necessary a constant revision of values.

These preliminaries completed, we stand on the threshold of a great problem-that of the factors which condition human achievement. It is necessary first to separate so far as possible the hereditary elements from the environmental and then to disentangle a few of the strands which lose themselves in the confused factor of environment.

The following topics will accordingly be discussed in subsequent sections: II. Heredity and Achievement; III. The Family Environment; IV. The Social Level of Opportunity; V. Social Situations and Psychical Tone; VI. The Social Verdict.

II. HEREDITY AND ACHIEVEMENT

By the hereditary factor in achievement is meant the original capital with which the individual begins his trading with life some nine months before he is born. It consists as a matter of fact of a single cell.

Although relatively undifferentiated in structure, the germ cells are so marvelously organized that in the compass of less than one-hundredth of an inch, the human oösperm contains the determining elements of all the physical and mental traits of the prospective individual. In so small a boat, or, as it has been well put, "across so narrow a bridge," is all the possible glory and beauty of life borne to us. Professor Walter, in his Genetics, well remarks, "the wonder grows that so small a bridge can stand such an enormous traffic." Whatever is implicit in this single cell constitutes for the forthcoming individual, heredity; whatever befalls that cell or any of its daughter-cells in the next nine months and seventy years is environment.

It has already been remarked that individuals are not only unequal in their hereditary endowment but that each is also unique in regard to it. One interesting qualification ought to be made at this point. In the human species about one birth in a hundred consists of twins and about one pair of twins in six is produced from a single fertilized egg cell. Such twins are called uniovular, identical, or duplicate twins. As Professor Smith, * Erville B. Woods, "The Subnormal Child," Educational Review, December, 1915, p. 481.

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writing in Science, points out, "in duplicate twins Nature tries for us the important experiment of making two individuals out of the same germ plasm." Such twins are always of the same sex, and apparently of precisely the same germinal constitution. It is as if two vessels were built from a single set of blueprints, for in the germ plasm are written the specifications of every organ, tendency, and characteristic of the prospective individual. According to the writer just mentioned, a study of the palm and sole markings of such identical twins affords a clue to the extent to which Nature lays down in the germ plasm the specifications of future growth.

Since, by a comparison of the prints, it may be seen that the resemblance is confined to the general pattern while there is no especial resemblance in the individual ridges (Galton's "Minutiae"), we arrive at what may be called the limit of germinal control, i.e., the point where the directive force felt in the development ceases to act, leaving further details to other forces.' Heredity apparently draws the outline whether of a starfish or of a man, specifies in a general way the bodily pattern, the architecture of the various organs, the type of reactions with which they are to respond to the environment and the various phases of their neural and psychical dispositions. But beyond this point Nature leaves a bit of discretion, so to speak, to the exigencies of experience itself, to those byplays of competing stimulations eternally beating in upon us which we humor ourselves by calling the freedom of the will.

From quite another field confirmatory evidence is adduced in support of this view of the limits of hereditary determination. I quote from Robert H. Gault:2

the disposition today among those who have given most attention to the experimental study of the question [i.e., of instinct] among lower animals is that there are but few instincts, properly speaking, and that these are less specific than generalized. They are natural dispositions that determine within wide limits what habits we shall develop, assuming that circumstances are favorable.

"Even the singing of birds is a highly modifiable instinct, or, as I prefer to believe, a complex habit built upon a generalized

2 "Psychology in Social Relations," American Journal of Sociology, XXII, 737 ff.

instinctive basis." A "crucial experiment" in this connection was that of Conradi, "who undertook to put a group of English sparrows to school. Canaries were elected to serve as schoolmasters. The sparrows were reared in the same room with the canaries severely isolated from others of their kind. The regular sparrow chirp developed at the proper time, but the birds soon lost that expression and assumed the peep that is characteristic of the young canary." Even a moderately successful imitation of the canary's song appeared in time. "Observations of this sort go far to justify the hypothesis that all our instincts are undefined motives and that what appears to be specializations are habits resting upon an instinctive basis-habits that are developed by repeated responses to environmental stimuli.”

From such considerations one may appreciate that the marvelous predeterminations which constitute heredity are no more marvelous than the almost indefinite flexibility of life in the presence of its world. Whatever a man's heredity, it always bears a contingent character-life and conduct should be talked of in terms of tendency, never in terms of rigid inevitability.

Inasmuch as this is a study primarily of the social environment, it would lead too far afield to attempt any extended analysis of the part played in achievement by specific inherited qualities. It is probable that certain conspicuous traits serve among primitive as well as civilized peoples, to mark a man off for distinction and usually for leadership. Professor Hutton Webster in a paper read before the American Sociological Society in 1917, after sketching a number of biographies of men eminent in the annals of primitive peoples, concludes that "strength of body and strength of will, unusual intelligence, a persuasive tongue, great energy, ambition, and force of character are the personal traits which raise a man above his fellows and constitute the leader." It would not be difficult to prove that the leaders of civilized peoples, not only in political life, but the great executives of the business world are very often notable for their physical endurance and, as Gowin has shown statistically, are of greater physical bulk than men in subordinate positions. Strength of will, particularly in the form of pertinacity, unusual intelligence, including a highly