TEE BLOOD OF THE NATION. 93 



France, that the stature is lower, and the physical force less among the 

 French peasantry than it was a century ago. If all this is true, then 

 the cause for it must be in some feature of the life of France which 

 has changed the normal processes of selection. 



X. In the present paper I shall not attempt to prove these state- 

 ments. They rest, so far as I know, entirely on assertions of French 

 writers, and statistics are not easily obtained. It suffices that an official 

 commission has investigated the causes of reduced fertility, with chiefly 

 negative results. It is not due primarily to intemperance nor vice nor 

 prudence nor misdirected education, the rush to 'ready-made careers,' 

 but to inherited deficiencies of the people themselves. It is not a matter 

 of the cities alone, but of the whole body of French peasantry. Legoyt, 

 in his study of 'the alleged degeneration of the French people,' tells us 

 that "it will take long periods of peace and plenty before France can 

 recover the tall statures mowed down in the wars of the republic and 

 the First Empire," though how plenty can provide for the survival of 

 the tallest this writer does not explain. Peace and plenty may preserve, 

 but they can not restore. 



It is claimed, on authority which I have failed to verify, that the 

 French soldier of to-day is nearly two inches shorter than the soldier 

 of a century ago. One of the most important of recent French books, 

 by Edmond Demolins, asks, "in what consists the superiority of the 

 Anglo-Saxon?" The answer is found in defects of training and of civic 

 and personal ideals, but the real cause lies deeper than all this. Low 

 ideals in education are developed by inferior men. Dr. Nordau 

 and his school of exponents of 'hand-painted science' find France 

 a nation of decadents, a condition due to the inherited strain of 

 an overwrought civilization. With them the word 'degenerate' is found 

 adequate to explain all eccentricities of French literature, art, politics, 

 or jurisprudence. 



XI. But science knows no such things as nerve-stress inheritance. 

 If it did, the peasantry of France have not been subjected to it. Their 

 life is hard, no doubt, but not stressful, and they suffer more from 

 nerve-sluggishness than from any form of enforced psychical activity. 

 The kind of degeneration Nordau pictures is not a matter of heredity. 

 Wlien not simply personal eccentricity, it is a phase of personal decay. 

 It finds its causes in bad habits, bad training, bad morals, or in the 

 desire to catch public attention for personal advantage. It has no per- 

 manence in the blood of the race. The presence on the Paris boulevards 

 of a mob of crazy painters, maudlin musicians, drunken poets, and 

 sensation-mongers proves nothing as to race degeneracy. When the 

 fashion changes they will change also. Already the fad of 'strenuous 

 life' is blowing them away. Any man of any race withers in an at- 

 mosphere of vice, absinthe and opium. The presence of such an at- 



