The age-herald., 1900-04-02
NATIONS DEGENERATE
 THROUGH WAR
From the New York Journal.

From the New York Journal.
 It Is recognized that the blood of na- ton in a large degree determines it's his tory. Knowing the nature of a race, we can forecast it's achievements. The Saxon will make Saxon history wherever he goes, the Jew will make Jewish, and the negro wherever he goes will do deeds after his kind. l wish to show that in similar fashion the history of nation determines its blood The nature of race is determined by the qualities of those of its number who leave offspring. If any class of men is destroyed by the action of social or po- itical forces, these leave no offspring, and their kind in time fails to appear.
 The only way in which any race as a whole has improved has been through its preservation of it's best and the loss of it's worst examples. The condition which favors this is democracy. equality before the law, the condition which equalizes op- portunity, and gives each man the right to stand or fall on the powers God 1has given him.
 The only race degeneration ever known is that produced by one or all of democ- racy's arch enemies: 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 ar mics could not use for it's purposes.
 take concrete illustration, the degen- eration of France An official commission has lately investigated it, reaching scanty results. Perhaps we may help them.
 In Frepch 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 were destroyed 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
 Prmogeniture-the basis of English poli- ty-has been and is inequality before the law. Men have tried to take a certain few, to feed them on royal jelly" as the 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. In making perfect men it has certainly failed for men are made by effort and resistance. But it has forced back again and again the other sons and daughters sons, back into the mass of the people.
 The English people of today are the sons of the old nobility, and their growth has crowded out the sons of the swineherd and the slave. The evil of primogeniture has been it's own antidote. It has begotten de- mocracy.
 On the continent it was not so Tn France all of noble lineage was noble Thus the blood of nobility and the blood of the clown were kept separate, and the clown increased with the failure of his betters.
 Other influences destroying The best were social repression, religious intolerance, ir- religious intolerance, the centralization of the activities in Paris. But all these other influences, large and small, count for lit- tie beside the great destroyer, war; war for glory; war for gain.
 Thus it has always been in history. It has ever been so and in the nature of things must ever be.