CHAPTER XXXVIII 

 DOES HEREDITY OR ENVIRONMENT MAKE MEN? 1 



ALBERT EDWARD WIGGAM 



All men are born unequal. When the Declaration of Independence 

 made its pronunciamento, it was merely to serve notice upon King 

 George that the American colonists were equal in their social, political 

 and human rights to the citizens of England. It was not meant as a 

 scientific formula from some laboratory of psychology which had tested 

 several thousand human beings and found them all exactly equal. In 

 all the common rights of man, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit 

 of happiness, the world now concedes that one man is as good as 

 another. 



But, when we study not men's rights, but men's natures and capa- 

 cities, nothing is more obvious than that all men are unequal; they 

 are born unequal; they will always be unequal ; nature intended them 

 to be unequal; and no system of government, social control, or educa- 

 tion has yet been devised or ever will be devised, that will make them 

 equal. Indeed, the astonishing and delightful discovery of modern 

 psychology and biology is that the more you educate men the more 

 unequal you make them. The more you equalize opportunity, the 

 more you unequalize men. The more nearly you treat men alike, the 

 more unlike they become. It was Henry van Dyke, I think, who said 

 that there is one thing in which all men are exactly alike, and that is 

 that they are all different. And the more you educate and develop 

 these differences, the more they grow into larger differences. 



As a matter of fact, that is what education and good environment 

 are for, to draw out and develop each man's individual and particular 

 capacities and powers. The old Romans invented the word "educa- 

 tion" — educo — a leading out of what was in a man, and not a pouring 

 in of some magic fire from Heaven to melt and mold his soul into a 

 likeness to other men. You can teach three boys the same knowledge 

 of history. You can inform them of exactly the same facts of the past. 

 But I do not believe any school-teacher in the world would maintain 

 that he had filled them with the same spirit and viewpoint. One boy 



1 Reprinted from The Fruit of the Family Tree. Copyright 1924 by the Bobbs- 



Merrill Company. 



49 1 



