i;8 National Life 



stocks, science may well call the attention of 

 our rulers to a possible famine a day when 

 we shall want brains and want physique, and 

 shall not find the necessary reserve of them. 



Take the case of ability in particular. 

 Francis Galton has shown us that it largely 

 arises from special stocks ; but if those stocks 

 decrease their output, then by so much does 

 the rare chance of a man of marked ability 

 appearing grow rarer. Again, I repeat, we 

 may, after all, only want brains in the right 

 place. But besides the need of them in 

 South Africa, which was recently fairly 

 manifest, look to any branch of national life, 

 and may we not fear the dearth has already 

 begun ? Where are the young men in the 

 political world who can stir even a small 

 section of the community to united action ? 

 Where are the younger civil servants to 

 replace our dying proconsuls, the men to 

 whom the nation can commit with a feeling 

 of security and confidence the future problems 

 of South Africa itself? Where are the new 

 writers to whom the nation listens as it did to 

 Carlyle, Ruskin, and Browning ? or for whose 

 books it eagerly waits as it did for those 



