It is recognized that the blood of a nation in a large degree determines its history. Knowing the nature of a race we can forecast its achievements. The Saxon will make Saxon history wherever he goes, the Jew will make Jewish history, and the negro wherever he goes will do deeds after his kind.

I wish to show that in similar fashion the history of a nation determines its blood. The word "blood" in this sense is a figure of speech, meaning heredity, for we know that the basis of heredity is in germ plasm, and not in literal blood. But the old word will serve our purposes. The blood which is thicker than water is the expression for race unity. The nature of a race is determined by the qualities of those of its members who leave offspring. If any class of men is destroyed by the action of social or political forces, these leave no offspring, and their kind in time fails to appear.

In a herd of cattle to destroy the strongest bulls, the fairest cows, the most promising calves, is to leave the others to become the parents of the coming herd. This we call degeneration, and it is the only kind of race degeneration we know, yet the scrawny, lean, infertile herd which results is of the same type as its actual parents. If, on the other hand, we sell or destroy the rough calves, the lean, poor, or ineffective, we shall have a herd descended from the best. These facts are the basis of selective breeding, "the magician's wand," which summon up any form of animal or plant useful to man or pleasing to his fancy.

The same facts are fundamental in human history. Viewed in the large sense,

a race of men is essentially like a herd of animals. If similar processes are followed its nature is changed in the same way and the same degree.

The only way in which any race as a whole has improved has been through its preservation of its best and the loss of its worst examples. The condition which favors this is democracy, equality before the law, the condition which equalizes opportunity and gives each man the right to stand or fall on the powers God has given

him.

The only race degeneration ever known is that produced by one or all of democracy's arch enmies-slavery, aristocracy, militarism, imperialism-the four tyrants of human politics, not one of whom appears without the others. The effect of these forces is to destroy the best, leaving for the fathers of the future those which military power could not use for its purposes.

Degeneracy of the individual is quite another thing, and has its own series of causes. But such degeneracy is not inherited. Unless entangled in the meshes of disease, every child is free born, the son of what his father and mother ought to have been. Neither education, indolence nor oppression can be inherited. They affect the individual life, but they cannot tarnish the blood.

The degeneracy discussed by Nordau and the school of journalistic scientists. which he represents is thus individual. It has no permanence. A mob of crazy painters, drunken musicians, maudlin poets, and sensation hunters on the boulevards proves nothing as to race degeneracy. Any man of any race degenerates