DOES HEREDITY OR ENVIRONMENT MAKE MEN? 55^ 



cess-pool dirt in the lowest sections of New York. The "settin'- 

 room" was properly named, for they seemed to do nothing but just 

 "set." 



Now honestly, my uplifting environmental friend, what can you 

 do for such people? They had plenty of money and ample oppor- 

 tunity. They went to picture shows, and their children attended, or 

 rather were forced to attend, school. "The old man" got three to ten 

 dollars a day. The farmers about the town were crying for tenants, 

 and willing, practically, to set a man and his family up in business if 

 they would only properly till the land. But their poverty was pure 

 biological poverty, inborn, ineradicable. Their real poverty was poor 

 heredity. And do you suppose that if those people drifted into the 

 larger cities they would build residences on the avenue, or would they 

 simply fall naturally into the slums? Many a strong man goes into 

 the slums, under the wicked crush of modern industrialism. But such 

 stock does not long remain there. Many of the children or the grand- 

 children fight their way out. The vast slums of the world are in the 

 main inhabited by breeds that have been there for centuries. Sydney, 

 Australia, has probably the largest slums relative to its size of any city 

 in Anglo-Saxon countries. The belief of Doctor Charles B. Daven- 

 port, who investigated it, is that this is largely due to the fact that 

 Sydney was originally settled chiefly by criminals and lower stocks 

 deported from England one hundred and fifty years ago. Anyone 

 who will read the account of the character of these shipments of slums 

 stocks which England sent for many years to Sydney in ship loads, 

 as given in the Encyclopedia Britannica, will, I think, be impressed with 

 the high probability of the truth of Doctor Davenport's conclusion. 



We have seen then that heredity is the preponderant factor in the 

 relative character of men, and almost the whole factor in mental ca- 

 pacity; and that our success as compared with that of our fellows is 

 largely a matter of our natural endowments. But the real lessons that 

 emerge for us all are, first, that you "can't make a silk purse out of a 

 sow's ear"; and second, that human success and human happiness are 

 largely relative things. "We are not trying to get ahead in this 

 world," as Professor Thorndike says, "but to get ahead of somebody." 

 To be tlie most beautiful girl in the county is beauty enough. The 

 most beautiful girl in Podunk feels no envy of Agnes Soret, long the 

 reigning beauty of France. I suppose President Wilson and Theodore 

 Roosevelt were eager to get ahead of each other. But you and I never 

 gave a thought about getting ahead of either one of them. The third 



