THE PROBLEM OF THE FUTURE II 



of children, difficulties of degeneracy, questions of national 

 fertility, all the bearings of charity, organized and un- 

 organized, state help and state control, all these and 

 many other sociological problems really await solution, 

 and we cannot teach the people what is really for the 

 welfare of the nation, because we ourselves do not know 

 it at present. If you consider the evils which are asso- 

 ciated with any of the problems I have referred to, you 

 will see that not the only, but the main difficulty of 

 remedying them lies in our ignorance of how much of the 

 evil is due to environment and how much is due to 

 heredity. Briefly, is nurture or nature responsible ? Is in- 

 sanity the product of the strain of modern life, or is a consti- 

 tutional weakness a necessary antecedent ? Do wretched 

 homes produce degenerate stock, or degenerate stock 

 wretched homes ? Is unemployment the outcome of de- 

 fective economic conditions, or the sign of the increasing 

 survival of human wastage ? Does the health of the children 

 depend more on the physique of their parents or on their 

 home environment ? You may reply that these questions 

 are insoluble ; that social evils flow partly from one 

 cause and partly from another. Can we be sure of that ? 

 Is that the way in which we have been taught to answer 

 in our academic training a physical or a biological 

 problem ? What would you think of a physicist who 

 told you that the position of the plumb-line depended 

 partly on gravity and partly on the rotation of the 

 earth ? Would you not at once ask him to define quan- 

 titatively the relative influence of both factors ? How is 

 it possible to evolve a working policy for social reform 

 if we do not know whether i per cent, or 90 per cent, of 

 the observed evil is due to nurture ? What breeder of 

 cattle would be content to state that the defects of his 



