REBIRTH AND HEREDITY 131 



instinct to mind and from mind to soul. So at the present 

 there is a more than usual amount of variation in the minds 

 and souls of families and nations ; nevertheless, we cannot 

 fail to mark that just as the power of heredity is more fixed 

 in plants than in animals, so also it is more fixed in mind 

 than matter, in character than body, in talents than habits. 



That the Aryan is an Aryan in mental qualities is 

 so marked that after two hundred and eighty thousand years 

 we can recognize his characteristics as unaltered, although 

 varied by environments, whether we meet them in the Hima- 

 layas under tropical suns or amidst the snows of Iceland, the 

 two extremes where it still remains least intermingled with 

 alien races. And we have no difficulty in picking out or detect- 

 ing its power of Government, Love of mercy and respect for 

 Justice, whether we find it in the mountains of India, the 

 steppes of Russia, or valleys of England, or faintly illustrating 

 the impetus which a sprinkling of its blood gave to Rome, 

 Greece, Palestine and Persia in the past, where struggling to 

 show, if only for a time, its influence on these races it is 

 finally lost in their decadence by its never having been suffici- 

 ently strong in force to permanently supplant the character- 

 istics of an overwhelming majority of Greek, Semitic or 

 Latin blood. So again we easily distinguish them from the 

 Latin or Teutonic races. And has not the present war been a 

 striking instance of the failure of fifteen hundred years of 

 science and civilisation to alter or vary the Vandal tempera- 

 ment to cruelty that stamps the Hun in the German race ? 



Still more marked is the difference between the Yellow, 

 Black and White races in their mental separation. This is 

 why it appears to my mind that when the Epoch of Hope has 

 attained its perfect conquest of the world by the will of man 

 and power of invention, during the Epoch of Charity 

 that will follow it, it will be incumbent upon future ages to 

 reform governments and religions, not by the punishment of 

 crime, but by turning attention to the abolition of free selec- 

 tion in marriage, and supplanting the propagation of the 

 perfections of mental fitness by fit and proper breeding, and 

 destroy the age of crime and vice by prohibiting the right of 

 marriage to the degenerate members of humanity, although I 

 would not advocate abolishing free selection amongst the fittest 

 of humanity. And it must be borne in mind that heredity of 



