94 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



wastes them." " This sublime and terrible phrase/' says another writer, 

 " sums up Spanish history." 



In 1630, according to Captain Calkins, the Augustinian friar, La 

 Puente, thus summed up the fate of Spain: 



Against the credit for redeemed souls, I set the cost of armadas and the 

 sacrifice of soldiers and friars sent to the Philippines. And this I count the 

 chief loss: for mines give silver and forests give timber, but only Spain gives 

 Spaniards, and she may give so many that she may be left desolate and con- 

 strained to bring up strangers' children instead of her own. 



Another of the noblest of Eoman provinces was Gallia, the favored 

 land, in which the best of the Eomans, the Pranks and the Northmen, 

 have mingled their blood to produce a nation of men, hopefully leaders 

 in the arts of peace, fatally leaders also in the arts of war. 



In that clever volume of his, Demolins asks : " In what constitutes 

 the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon?" Before we answer this, we may 

 ask, "In what constitutes the inferiority of races not Anglo-Saxon?" 

 If we admit that inferiority exists in any degree, may we not find in 

 the background the causes of the fall of Greece, the fall of Eome, the 

 fall of Spain? We find the spirit of domination, the spirit of glory, 

 the spirit of war, the final survival of subserviency, of cowardice and 

 of sterility. The man who is left holds in his grasp the history of the 

 future. The evolution of a race is always selective, never collective. 

 Collective evolution among men or beasts, the movement upward or 

 downward of the whole as a whole, irrespective of training or selection, 

 does not exist. As Lepouge has said, " It exists in rhetoric, not in 

 truth nor in history." 



The survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence is the primal 

 moving cause of race progress and of race changes. In the red stress of 

 human history, this natural process of selection is sometimes reversed. 

 A reversal of selection is the beginning of degradation. It is degrada- 

 tion itself. Can we see the fall of Eome in any part of the history of 

 modern Europe ? Let us look again at the history. A single short part 

 of it will be enough. It will give us the clue to the rest. 



In the Wiertz gallery in Brussels is a wonderful painting, dating 

 from the time of Waterloo, called Napoleon in Hell. It represents the 

 great marshal with folded arms and face unmoved descending slowly 

 to the land of the shades. Before him, filling all the background of the 

 picture with every expression of countenance, are the men sent before 

 him by the unbridled ambition of Napoleon. Three millions and sev- 

 enty thousand there were in all — so history tells us — more than half of 

 them Frenchmen. They are not all shown in one picture. They are 

 only hinted at. And behind the millions shown or hinted at are the 

 millions on millions of men who might have been and are not — the 

 huge widening human wedge of the possible descendants of the men who 



