EDUCATION AND THE FUTURE OF THE RACE 293 



pointed out the dire consequences that must result 

 for France should her chief thinking and productive 

 men, engineers, lawyers, physicians, scientists, 

 a small number, be removed from the kingdom. 

 At the same time he incurred political disfavor and 

 was banished for suggesting how easily the country 

 might dispense with the services of an equal number 

 of courtiers, nobles, and royal personages. There is 

 no doubt as to the reasonableness of Saint-Simon's 

 main contention that the leading minds of a country, 

 the minds which determine the lines of progress, are 

 relatively few, and that the loss of this intellectual 

 aristocracy would cripple any community for many 

 a year. Our interest thus focuses on this upper 

 stratum of minds when we undertake to picture the 

 future mental powers of our race. Is it possible to 

 increase the capacity of the human mind by the 

 processes of evolution ? Is there any evidence that 

 the best minds of to-day are superior in quality to the 

 best minds of the earliest historic times ? Unfortu- 

 nately the data at command do not allow the forma- 

 tion of a wholly satisfactory judgment on these ques- 

 tions. If it be true that man has evolved from 

 lower forms of animal life, mental evolution must 

 have been a feature of this upward progress, but 

 when we try to compare the best minds of the pres- 

 ent day with those of a few thousand years ago, we 

 are confronted by serious difficulty in making any 

 reliable comparison, mainly because it is impossible 

 to represent to ourselves similar minds operating 



