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.

in an environment of vice, disease and absinthe. But he may leave his race all the cleaner for his degenerating.

I take a concrete illustration, the degeneration of France-the falling off in stature and fertility of the French people during the present century. An official commission has lately investigated it, reaching scanty results. Perhaps we may help them.

I wish you to assume that Millet's "Man with the Hoe" is in a large degree typical of the French peasantry. Dull, lack-lustre-cyed, with low forehead, and brutal jaw, he is not the product of oppression. His like has always lived in France. His qualities are ancient, aboriginal. He exists to-day, and has increased for a century because better men have been destroyed. And this is the primal cause of the fall of France, of the decline of any nation whatever the destruction of the best, the survival of the unfittest, a reversal of nature's method of race purification and of race advance.

In French history how has this happened? Let us look at a few instances. among many.

The French Revolution. In this outbreak of the oppressed "the best that the nation could bring" was destroyed.

The nobility of any nation, and more of aristocracy, was composed in the first. place of its best blood. The failure physically comes from bad training, luxury, vice and irresponsible power. These effects are individual only, and do not pass over into heredity. The strongest, wisest, fairest, were the noblemen when races were young.

of Terror.

And these fell in the Reign

The old drummer, Pierre, in Thackeray's "Chronicles of the Drum," tells us that:

"Those glorious days of September Saw many aristocrats fall. 'Twas thus that our pikes drank the blood In the beautiful breast of Lamballe.

"Pardi! 'twas a beautiful lady!

I seldom have looked on her like, And I drummed for a gallant procession That marched with her head on a pike. ́

And so with the rest of them, not forgetting the Queen and the King. And the blood of France has been poorer, her men less manly, and her women less fair, since the day of her great slaughter, whatever one may think of the political changes it brought about.

Primogeniture: The basis of English polity has been and is inequality before the law. Men have tried to take a certain few, to feed these on "royal jelly," as the young queen bee is fed, to take them out of the struggle and competition of life, and to make them by such means harmonious and perfect men and women. Thus, in England, the oldest son is chosen for this purpose a good thing, says Samuel Johnson, "because it insures only one fool in the family." In making perfect men it has certainly failed, for men are made by effort and resistance. But it has forced constantly the younger sons' and daughters' sons back again into the mass of the people. The English people of to-day are the sons of the old nobility, and their development has crowded out the sons of the swineherd and the slave. The evil of primogeniture has been its own antidote. It has begotten democracy. The younger sons, with Richard Rumbold. "never could believe that Providence hasent into the world a few men already booted and spurred, with countless millions already saddled and bridled, with these few to ride." And so these younger sons became the Roundhead, the Puritan, the Pilgrim, those who in all the ages have fought for liberty in England and in the United States. Genealogical studies clearly show that all of the old families of New England and Virginia have noble. and royal blood in their veins. The Massachusetts farmer whose ancestors came from Plymouth in Devon has more of the blood of William and Alfred than the Queen of England has, for she is mostly German. And it is well for England that her gentle blood runs in the veins of all her citizens.

On the Continent it was not so. In France, all of noble lineage were noble. Thus the blood of nobility and the blood of the clown were kept separate, and the