38 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
homogeneity may be applied. Such attempts will, I anticipate, be made 
when the present unstable social state reaches a climax of instability, 
which may not be long hence. Their effects can be but evanescent. 
The instability is due not to inequality, which is inherent and congenital, 
but rather to the fact that in periods of rapid change like the present, 
convection-currents are set up such that the elements of the strata 
get intermixed and the apparent stratification corresponds only roughly 
with the genetic. Ina few generations under uniform conditions these 
elements settle in their true levels once more. 
In such equilibrium is content most surely to be expected. ‘To the 
naturalist the broad lines of solution of the problems of social dis- 
content are evident. They lie neither in vain dreams of a mystical and 
disintegrating equality, nor in the promotion of that malignant indi- 
vidualism which in older civilisations has threatened mortification of 
the humbler organs, but rather in a physiological co-ordination of the 
constituent parts of the social organism. The rewards of commerce 
are grossly out of proportion to those attainable by intellect or industry. 
Even regarded as compensation for a dull life, they far exceed the 
value of the services rendered to the community. Such disparity is an 
incident of the abnormally rapid growth of population and is quite 
indefensible as a permanent social condition. Nevertheless capital, 
distinguished as a provision for offspring, is a eugenic institution; and 
unless human instinct undergoes some profound and improbable 
variation, abolition of capital means the abolition of effort; but as in 
the body the power of independent growth of the parts is limited and 
subordinated to the whole, similarly in the community we may limit the 
powers of capital, preserving so much inequality of privilege as 
corresponds with physiological fact. 
At every turn the student of political science is confronted with 
problems that demand biological knov ledge for their solution. Most 
obviously is this true in regard te education, the criminal law, and 
all those numerous branches of policy and administration which are 
directly concerned with the physiological capacities of mankind. 
Assumptions as to what can be done and what cannot be done to 
modify individuals and races have continually to be made, and the 
basis of fact on which such decisions are founded can be drawn only 
from biological study. 
A knowledge of the facts of nature is not yet deemed an essential 
part of the mental equipment of politicians; but as the priest, who 
began in other ages as medicine-man, has been obliged to abandon 
the medical parts of his practice, so will the future behold the school- 
master, the magistrate, the lawyer, and ultimately the statesman, 
compelled to share with the naturalist those functions which are 
concerned with the physiology of race. 
