The 

 Human 

 Harvest 



[48] 



gree, and if we answer it in any degree, we 

 find in the background the causes of the fall 

 of Greece, the fall of Rome, the fall of Spain. 

 We find the spirit of domination, the spirit 

 of glory, the spirit of war, the final survival 

 of subserviency, of cowardice and of steril- 

 ity. 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, is never a fact. As Lepouge has 

 said, "It exists in rhetoric, not in truth nor 

 in history." 



Demolins finds the answer to his question 

 in the false standards of French life, in de- 

 fects of training and of civic and personal 

 ideals ; but the real cause lies deeper than 

 all this. Low ideals in education are devel- 

 oped by inferior men. The school of "hand- 

 painted science," of which Dr. MaxNordau 

 is the ablest exponent, finds France a nation 

 of decadents, — a condition due to the in- 

 herited strain of an overwrought civiliza- 

 tion. To Nordau the word "degenerate" 



