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a community? Why simply that geniality and probity and ability may be fostered 
indeed by home environment and by provision of good schools and well equipped 
institutions for research, but that their origin, like health and muscle, is deeper 
down than these things. They are bred and not created. That good stock breeds 
good stock is a commonplace of every farmer; tbat the strong man and woman 
have healthy children is widely recognized too. But we have left the moral and 
mental faculties as qualities for which we can provide amply by home environment 
and sound education. 
It is the stock itself which makes its home environment, the education is of 
small service, unless it be applied to an intelligent race of men. 
Our traders declare that we are no match for Germans and Americans. Our 
men of science run about two continents and proclaim the glory of foreign 
universities and the crying need for technical instruction. Our politicians catch 
the general apprehension and rush to heroic remedies. Looking round im- 
passionately from the calm atmosphere of anthropology, I fear there really 
does exist a lack of leaders of the highest intelligence, in science, in the arts, in 
trade, even in politics. I do seem to see a want of intelligence in the British 
merchant, in the British professional man and in the British workman. But I do 
not think the remedy lies solely in adopting foreign methods of instruction or in 
the spread of technical education. I believe we have a paucity, just now, of the 
better intelligences to guide us, and of the moderate intelligences to be successfully 
guided. The only account we can give of this on the basis of the results we have 
reached to-night is that we are ceasing as a nation to breed intelligence as we did 
fifty to a hundred years ago. The mentally better stock in the nation is not 
reproducing itself at the same rate as it did of old ; the less able, and the less 
energetic, are more fertile than the better stocks. No scheme of wider or more 
thorough education will bring up in the scale of intelligence hereditary weakness 
to the level of hereditary strength. The only remedy, if one be possible at all, is 
to alter the relative fertility of the good and the bad stocks in the community. 
Let us have a census of the effective size of families ainong the intellectual 
classes now and a comparison with the effective size of families in the like classes 
in the first half of last century. You will, I feel certain, find, as in the case of 
recent like censuses in America, that the intellectual classes are now scarcely 
reproducing their own numbers, and are very far from keeping pace with the total 
growth of the nation. Compare in another such census the fertility of the more 
intelligent working man with that of the uneducated hand labourer. You will, I 
again feel certain, find that grave changes have taken place in relative fertility 
during the last forty years. We stand, I venture to think, at the commencement of 
an epoch, which will be marked by a great dearth of ability. If the views I have 
put before you to-night be even approximately correct, the remedy lies beyond the 
reach of revised educational systems ; we have failed to realise that the psychical 
characters, which are, in the modern struggle of nations, the backbone of a state, 
are not manufactured by home and school and college ; they are bred in the bone ; 
