A SANITARY OUTLOOK 361 



we deteriorate the race intellectually, for physical characters are not 

 manufactured by school or college, but are bred in the bone, and if our 

 intellectual classes are physically enfeebled by their intellectual exer- 

 tions, are enervated by wealth and the love of pleasure, or restrained 

 by prudence born of a wrong standard of life, so that they fail to supply 

 us with a due proportion of intellectuals, then progressive decadence 

 is in store for us. 



For my own part, however, I am inclined to think that intellectual 

 decadence, if it is upon us, is not altogether due to the causes assigned 

 by Professor Pearson and Mr. Balfour, and is not necessarily destined 

 to deepen as time goes on. In a people like ours, there is always out- 

 side the actually intellectual class, a still larger class, potentially intel- 

 lectual with abilities incompletely evolved, because never called forth, 

 but capable under stress of circumstance of the higher development, 

 just as an ordinary working bee is capable of conversion into a queen 

 by appropriate feeding. This potentially intellectual class, more pro- 

 lific than the actually intellectual, may make up for its deficiencies 

 and, breeding true or with favorable variations, supply us with intel- 

 lectual leaders as good as any we have hitherto had. 



Then I am quite sure that the educational ladders, provided hitherto 

 to enable children of the humbler class to climb up in the social scale, 

 do not by any means ensure the transference of the intellectuals from 

 the lower to the higher level. They are mounted by the nimble, the 

 quick-witted, the precocious, whose intellectual energies are in many 

 instances soon exhausted, and around the foot of these ladders there 

 remain numbers of children of really finer intellectual power but slower 

 of growth than those who have scrambled up them. We have thus in 

 our humbler or uneducated class, as they are called, a reserve of intel- 

 lectuals of undiminished fertility, capable of supplying recruits to the 

 intellectual class of the next generation. Many of our finest intel- 

 lectuals have sprung from the unintellectual class, and genius is gen- 

 erally more or less of a sport. 



My own view is that any dearth of ability from which we may be 

 suffering or by which we may be threatened is to be ascribed not so 

 much to the infertility of the cultivated classes as to the artificial pro- 

 duction of stupidity in various ways and to the incessant draining from 

 the country, which is the fit and proper breeding place and rearing 

 ground of intellect, of the best elements of our people to be swallowed 

 up, and exterminated or deteriorated in our big towns. We keep 

 nipping off the buds of promise, and if we insist on having lots of green 

 gooseberry tart, we must be content to go with less of ripe gooseberry 

 jam. As Dr. Ogle has said, " the combined effect of the higher mor- 

 tality of the town and of the constant immigration into it of the pick 

 of the rural population, must clearly be a gradual deterioration of the 



