642 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ceptivity of whatever form the State decides to impress. Whether 

 submissiveness be or be not part of the nature which the incor- 

 porated society proposes to give its units, it can not enforce its 

 plans without either finding or creating submissiveness. Whether 

 avowedly or not, part of the desired character must be readiness 

 in each citizen to submit, or make his children submit, to a disci- 

 pline which some or many citizens determine to impose. There 

 may be men who think it a trait of high humanity thus to deliver 

 over the formation of its nature to the will of an aggregate mostly 

 formed of inferior units. But with such we will not argue. 



One further necessary implication is that either there exists no 

 natural process by which citizens are in course of being molded, 

 or else that this natural process should be superseded by an arti- 

 ficial one. To assert that there is no natural process is to assert 

 that, unlike all other beings, which tend ever to become adapted 

 to their environments, the human being does not tend to become 

 adapted to his environment does not tend to undergo such 

 changes as fit him for carrying on the life which circumstances 

 require him to lead. Any one who says this must say that the 

 varieties of mankind have arisen without cause ; or else have been 

 caused by governmental action. Any one who does not say this 

 must admit that men are in course of being naturally adjusted to 

 the requirements of a developed social state ; and if he admits 

 this, he will hesitate before he asserts that they may be better 

 adjusted artificially. 



Let us pass now from these most abstract aspects of the matter 

 to more concrete aspects. 



It is decided to create citizens having forms fit for the life of 

 their society. Whence must the conception of a fit form be de- 

 rived ? Men inherit not only the physical and mental constitu- 

 tions of their ancestors, but also, in the main, their ideas and be- 

 liefs. The current conception of a desirable citizen must there- 

 fore be a product of the past, slightly modified by the present ; 

 and the proposal is that past and present shall impose their con- 

 ception on the future. Any one who takes an impersonal view of 

 the matter can scarcely fail to see in this a repetition, in another 

 sphere, of follies committed in every age by every people in re- 

 spect of religious beliefs. In all places and in all times, the aver- 

 age man holds that the creed in which he has been brought is the 

 only true creed. Though it must be manifest to him that neces- 

 sarily in all cases but one, such beliefs, held with confidence equal 

 to that which he feels, are false ; yet, like each of the others, he is 

 certain that his belief is the exception. A confidence no less 

 absurd, is shown by those who would impose on the future their 

 ideal citizen. That conceived type which the needs of past and 

 present times have generated, they do not doubt would be a type 



