1906.] 



JORDAN— THE HUMAN HARVEST. 61 



Thus we read in Roman history the rise of the mob and of the 

 emperor who is the mob's exponent. It is not the presence of the 

 emperor which makes imperiaHsm. It is the absence of the people, 

 the want of men. Babies in their day have been emperors. A 

 wooden image would serve the same purpose. More than once it 

 has served it. The decline of a people can have but one cause, the 

 decline in the type from which it draws its sires. A herd of cattle 

 can degenerate in no other way than this, and a race of men is under 

 the same laws. By the rise in absolute power, as a sort of historical 

 barometer, we may mark the decline in the breed of the people. We 

 see this in the history of Rome. The conditional power of Julius 

 Caesar, resting on his own tremendous personality, showed that the 

 days were past of Cincinnatus and of Junius Brutus. The power 

 of Augustus showed the same. But the decline went on. It is 

 written that " the little finger of Constantine was thicker than the 

 loins of Augustus." The emperor in the time of Claudius and 

 Caligula was not the strong man who held in check all lesser men 

 and organizations. He was the creature of the mob, and the mob, 

 intoxicated with its own work, worshipped him as divine. Doubt- 

 less the last emperor, Augustulus Romulus, before he was thrown 

 into the scrap-heap of history, was regarded in the mob's eyes and 

 his own as the most godlike of them all. 



What have the historians to say of these matters ? Very few have 

 grasped the full significance of their own words, for very few have 

 looked on men as organisms, and on nations as dependent on the 

 specific character of the organisms destined for their reproduction. 



So far as I know, Benjamin Franklin was the first to think of 

 man thus as an inhabitant, a species in nature among other species 

 and dependent on nature's forces as other animals and other inhabi- 

 tants must be. 



In Otto Seeck's great history of '' The Downfall of the Ancient 

 World" (Der Untergang der Antiken Welt), he finds this downfall 

 due solely to the rooting out of the best (" Die Ausrottung der 

 Besten"). The historian of the ''Decline and Fall of the Roman 

 Empire " or any other empire is engaged solely with the details of 

 the process by which the best men are exterminated. Speaking of 

 Greece, Dr. Seeck says, "A wealth of force of spirit went down in 



