New-York tribune., 1921-10-30


before it rolls over on it's collective
- curls up It's toes and gently expires.
r.sv are paging the superman, and they see
:. bope of finding enough of him to do any
.cod anywhere, except in that section of So
s.tv which supplies us with what intellectual
.-sxtocracy we have-the people who work
u~,.h their brains, pay the taxes, send their
.A;ldren to school and church, if they are self
..erifcing enough to have children; strive all
.hs;r lives to maintain their place in decent
.nvSropment and when they die leave their
families their insurance and little, if any
thing, else.
II is the first time any one has said a really
rood word for the downtrodden middle class
N almost forty years-since, in fact, William
Graham Sumner, that superbly human politi-
eal economist OF generation ago. raised
,retest against the submergence of the For
cottsn Man, the inoffensive gentleman who
eventually foots the bills for all the humani-
tsrian projects other people think up, and who
mes without his beer because somebody de-
.;dss il is bad for the laboring people
But even though the eugenists have come
.o champion our declining mental workers, it
nust be admitted there is something of a
catch in it, for they offer little but moral sup
mort in the war of classes which is declared
TO be going on about US silently, bloodlessly
snd fatally to the section of the population
most fit.
Sometimes the eugenists talk, as one or two
of them did at the international meeting they
held recently in New York. of some form of
endowment to encourage parents of selected
classes to rear children, but for the most part
the remedy they propose is moral campaign
TO acouaint those most fit to carry on the race
with the necessity of bringing forth more chill
aren if the best elements of mankind are not
TO disappear. They are one group of re-
formers who are not forever trying to get
laws passed about something. At any rate,
thew have not reached that stage yet.
1t was very serious gathering, that Inter
national Congress of Eugenics, with its hun
dred or more biologists, anthropologists, ply
sicians and economists thronginG through the
halls Of the American Museum of Natural
History and shaking their heads, SO to speak,
at the old dinosaur, as if prophetic that some
time the human species would exist only in re-
constructed specimens kept in glass cases. 1t
was a serious gathering, whether its members
listened to an exposition of the mystery of the
chromosomes and the miracle of the germ
plasm, or whether they gravely considered an
IL l i -,L
from Japanese waltzing mice.
1t was so serious, indeed, that its leaders in
athropology, with practical unanimity, pre-
dcted nothing short OF racial ruin unless man
kind shall turn its steps from the path it has
been following for long, disastrous centuries
and take prompt, intelligent and courageous
measures to check the threatening decadence of
the species.
They pictured world whose social and eco
nomic development has outstripped the power
and intelligence of its best minds and entangled
helpless man in the wheels Of machine he
himself has devised; they proclaimed the ne
cessity if We are to develop and not slide back
down the slope Of history, of cultivating super
men, And the superman they were paging out
at the museum was anything but the huge,
blond, ruthless beast of Nietzsche's now dis
llusoned followers, but one who very likely
will wear spectacles and, above all, will be kind
to his family
This picture of humankind, finding itself in
adequate and losing ground at moment in his
tory which presents stupendous opportunities
and tragic perils, was painted in the bodest
coiors by DR.. G. Y. de Lapouge, of the Uni
versity of Nancy, in study of the situation
IN which he found that the war had wiped out
an appalingly high proportion of the best
families of Europe. He said:
The time is no more when the earth will
easily furnish necessities In social
ile the problems to be solved by the states
man. the chief of industry, of commerce, or
Ol the bank will become so complex that they
Will pass the limit of present mentality. To-
morrow you will no longer find a man who may
surmount certain new tasks, and l dare say
snat the best men Of to-day are severely tried
" present difficulties. The mass of knowledge
werwhelms the understanding. 1t is neces-
safy to forge greater memories and sharper
Perceptions.
lhe hour has arrived when man must
'uoose If he will become demigod if he
viii return to the barbarism of the contem
p0rarles of the mammoth.
And 1t is not figure of rhetoric to speak