100 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tation would be well worth saving. We cannot easily, with Mr. Reid, 

 regard alcohol as an instrument of race-purification, nor believe that 

 the growth of abstinence and prohibition only prepares the race for a 

 future deeper plunge into dissipation. If France, through wine, has 

 grown temperate, she has grown tame. "New Mirabeaus," Carlyle tells 

 us, "one hears not of; the wild kindred has gone out with this, its 

 greatest." This fact, whatever the cause, is typical of great, strong, 

 turbulent men who led the wild life of Mirabeau because they knew 

 nothing better. 



XXIII. The concentration of the energies of France in the one 

 great city of Paris is again a potent agency in the impoverishment of 

 the blood of the rural districts. All great cities are destroyers of life. 

 Scarcely one would hold its own in population or power were it not for 

 the young men of the farms. In such destruction Paris has ever taken 

 the lead. The education of the middle classes in France is almost ex- 

 clusively a preparation for public life. To be an official in a great city 

 is an almost universal ideal. This ideal but few attain, and the lives of 

 the rest are largely wasted. Not only the would-be official, but artist, 

 poet, musician, physician or journalist seeks his career in Paris. A few 

 may find it. The others, discouraged by hopeless effort or vitiated by 

 corrosion, faint and fall. Every night some few of these cast themselves 

 into the Seine. Every morning they are brought to the morgue behind 

 the old Church of Notre Dame. It is a long procession and a sad one 

 from the provincial village to the strife and pitfalls of the great city, 

 from hope and joy to absinthe and the morgue. With all its pitiful 

 aspects the one which concerns us is the steady drain on the life-blood of 

 the nation : its steady lowering of the average of the parent stock of the 

 future. 



XXIV. But far more potent for evil to the race than all these in- 

 fluences, large and small, is the one great destroyer — War. War for 

 glory, war for gain, war for dominion, its effect is the same whatever 

 its alleged purpose. 



