DEMOCRACY AND THE HUMAN 

 EQUATION 



A Review of AUeyne Ireland's New Book' 



F'rederick Adams Woods 



TWO years or more ago, the 

 Journal of Heredity contained 

 some stirring communications of 

 a provocative sort, and in a field 

 out-side its customary limits. These 

 were brought to press through an 

 article entitled "Democracy and the 

 Accepted Facts of Heredity" by Al- 

 leyne Ireland published in December 

 1918. 



The main issue in this debate was 

 whether the theory of extreme de- 

 mocracy, so much exploited since the 

 outbreak of the Great War, could find 

 justification in the work of modern 

 students of biology. Mr. Ireland con- 

 tended that if the biologists are right 

 in denying the inheritance of traits 

 accumulated through slow action of 

 the environment, and if the students 

 of human heredity are right in claim- 

 ing the preponderating importance of 

 germ-plasm, then the theo'-y of democ- 

 racy had some ugly facts to face. 



This point of view has scarcely been 

 recognized by any writers on the theory 

 of government. The biologists have 

 gone steadily along, in the last twenty 

 years, since the rediscovery of Mendel's 

 Laws, acquiring more and more proof 

 of the clean-cut control of the chro- 

 mosomes. The psychologists have piled 

 up convincing evidence of mental and 

 moral heredity, and have found in 

 their mental-age tests (army, mental- 

 tests, etc) undeniable evidence of the 

 fundamental inequalities in human 

 beings, and j^et, those who should 

 profit by this work, or at least dis- 

 cuss its significance, have apparently 

 been ignorant of its existence. 



Mr. Ireland is a specialist in Govern- 

 ment. He has spent his life investigat- 

 ing and studying systems of government 

 in various parts of the world. He 



has been a correspondent of The 

 London Times, in the Far East; and 

 has published several weighty books 

 on colonial government, including 

 "The Province of Burma," "The Far 

 Eastern Tropics," and "Colonial Ad- 

 ministration." He was at one time 

 on the Editorial staff of the New York 

 World, has lived much in America as 

 well as in England, his native land, 

 and so is, at least by nurture fitted 

 for the comparative point of view. 



Whether he is right or wrong in this 

 brilliant, and perhaps hypercritical 

 book on present day tendencies in the 

 United States, it is certainly note- 

 worthy that a man of this sort should 

 show an interest in the technical as- 

 pects of heredity, and seek to apply 

 them in his own domain. 



The controversy held in the Journal 

 OF Heredity has now blossomed forth 

 as a book, in which two chapters are 

 devoted to biological relationships, 

 and this section of the work is likely 

 to be of chief interest to the majority 

 of our readers. 



Here the author does not follow the 

 usual method of sociologists and 

 political writers, and merely discuss 

 in terms of vague statements and 

 unsupported generalizations (deduc- 

 tive method which ought to be con- 

 sidered out-of-date) but actually 

 appeals to the results of researches. 



Almost all of these are now summar- 

 ized in Popenoe and Johnson's "Ap- 

 plied Eugenics" and Mr. Ireland has 

 made an eager incursion into this 

 modern storehouvse. He refers espe- 

 cially to Gabon's "Oxford and Cam- 

 bridge Graduates," Wood's "Heredity 

 and the Hall of Fame" and "Heredity 

 in Royalty," Thorndike's "Twins in 

 New York City." Pearsons, Barring- 



' Democracy and the Human Equation, by Allevne Ireland, F. R. G. S., pp. 251. New 

 York, E. P. Dutton & Co. 192 L 



205 



