THE NEW OPTIMISM 501 



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terrible revenge. In former days, tuberculosis, typhus, typhoid fever 

 and smallpox swept through the land, removing crowds of the unfit and 

 those not immune to these diseases, leaving the sound, the hearty, and 

 the immune to become the fathers and mothers of the next generation. 



Perhaps the clearest statement of these views is found in an article 

 on " Decadence and Civilization," by W. C. D. and Catherine D. Whet- 

 ham in a recent number of The Hibbert Journal. These writers point 

 out that in all our sympathetic care for the unfit we are sacrificing 

 heredity to environment. "It is conceivable," they say, for instance, 

 " that a wilderness of sanatoria may serve as easily to increase tubercular 

 disease in the future as to diminish it in the present." As regards our 

 warfare against alcohol, they continue, we are only laying up for our- 

 selves future trouble. The races of southern Europe, where wine is 

 abundant, have gradually become immune to alcohol, those families not 

 able to use it moderately having perished, so that drunkenness, while 

 formerly common in these countries, is now rare. Hence it is urged 

 that, if by restrictive measures we make alcohol unattainable for the 

 present, in the future a demoralizing wave of alcoholism will overcome 

 all barriers, showing again that we are sacrificing heredity to present 

 environment. 



Again, still further and still worse, it is said, the emergence of 

 woman into industrial and political life, while it will purify and ennoble 

 society for the present, means race deterioration in the future. Say 

 the same writers : 



Apparently, for a time we can shift a great part of the burdens of the 

 country on to women, who can undersell their husbands and brothers and we 

 probably effect thereby a distinct temporary improvement in our own genera- 

 tion, for a woman of better education and character can always be secured for 

 a lower rate of pay ; but we are devouring our one essential form of life capital, 

 female humanity and the process must end in disaster. 



A man may be a hard worker in industrial or political fields and at 

 the same time the father of a robust and numerous family. On the 

 contrary; a woman's "essential function is motherhood," and partici- 

 pation in industrial or political activity invariably interferes with this 

 function. 



It is not a mere coincidence that the women whose names are best known 

 and most distinguished for social, artistic and literary services were for the 

 most part unmarried or childless, so that the special gifts which brought them 

 fame died with them. 



So much, then, for the voice of the pessimist. We must admit that 

 there is force in these arguments and that some of the dangers referred 

 to are real dangers, but the spirit of the new optimism affirms that all 

 these difficulties as they arise will be successfully met by the uncon- 

 querable power of the human mind, as others have been met before. 

 There may be, it is true, no more rich unoccupied lands to the westward, 

 but scientific agriculture is showing that there are almost infinite unoc- 

 cupied possibilities in the soil under our feet. Malthus's law of popu- 



