66 JORDAN— THE HUMAN HARVEST. [April i8, 



tion, the spirit of glory, the spirit of war, the final survival of sub- 

 serviency, of cowardice and of sterility. The man who is left holds 

 in his grasp the history of the future. The evolution of a race is 

 always selective, never collective. Collective evolution among men 

 or beasts, the movement upward or downward of the whole as a 

 whole, irrespective of training or selection does not exist. As Le- 

 pouge has said, " It exists in rhetoric, not in truth nor in history." 



The survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence is the 

 primal moving cause of race progress and of race changes. In the 

 red stress of human history, this natural process of selection is some- 

 times reversed. A reversal of selection is the beginning of degrada- 

 tion. It is degradation itself. Can we see the fall of Rome in the 

 downfall of France? Let us look again at the history. A single 

 short part of it will be enough. It will give us the clue to the rest. 



In the Wiertz gallery in Brussels is a wonderful painting, dating 

 from the time of Waterloo, called Napoleon in Hell. It represents 

 the great marshal with folded arms and face unmoved descending 

 slowly to the land of the shades. Before him, filling all the back- 

 ground of the picture with every expression of countenance are the 

 men sent before him by the unbridled ambition of Napoleon. Three 

 millions and seventy thousand there were in all — so history tells us, 

 more than half of them Frenchmen. They are not all shown in one 

 picture. They are only hinted at. And behind the millions shown 

 or hinted at are the millions on millions of men who might have been 

 and are not — the huge widening human wedge of the possible de- 

 scendants of the men who fell in battle. These men of Napoleon's 

 armies were the youth without blemish, " the best that the nation 

 could bring," chosen as " food for powder," " ere evening to be tram- 

 pled like the grass," in the rush of Napoleon's great battles. These 

 men came from the plow, from the work-shop, from the school, the 

 best there were— those from eighteen to thirty-five years of age at 

 first, but afterwards the older and the younger. " A boy will stop a 

 bullet as well as a man " ; this maxim is accredited to Napoleon. 

 ^' The more vigorous and well born a young man is," says Novicow, 

 *' the more normally constituted, the greater his chance to be slain by 

 musket or magazine, the rifled cannon and other similar engines of 

 civilization." Among those destroyed by Napoleon were " the elite 



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