, "the
greater demands on nervous and intellectual force which the culture and
refinement of the upper classes produce are chiefly responsible for
this. For these are the two personal factors by which those classes are
distinguished from the lower classes: high education and refinement in
tastes and habits. The first involves predominant activity of the brain,
the last a heightened sensitiveness in all departments of nervous life.
In both respects, therefore, there is increased work for the nervous
system, and this is compensated in the other vital functions, especially
reproduction. Man cannot achieve everything; what he gains on one side
he loses on the other." We should do well to hold these wise words in
mind when we encounter those sciolists who in the presence of the finest
and rarest manifestations of civilizations, can only talk of race
"decay." A female salmon, it is estimated, lays about nine hundred eggs
for every pound of her own weight, and she may weigh fifty pounds. The
progeny of Shakespeare and Goethe, such as it was, disappeared in the
very centuries in which these great men themselves died. At the present
stage of civilization we are somewhat nearer to Shakespeare and Goethe
than to the salmon. We must set our ideals towards a very different
direction from that which commends itself to our Salmonidian sciolists.
"Increase and multiply" was the legendary injunction uttered on the
threshold of an empty world. It is singularly out of place in an age in
which the earth and the sea, if not indeed the very air, swarm with
countless myriads of undistinguished and indistinguishable human
creatures, until the beauty of the world is befouled and the glory of
the Heavens bedimmed. To stem back that tide is the task now imposed on
our heroism, to elevate and purify and refine the race, to introduce
the ideal of quality in place of the ideal of quantity which has run
riot so long, with the results we see. "As the Northern Saga tells that
Odin must sacrifice his eye to attain the higher wisdom," concludes
Fahlbeck, "so Man also, in order to win the treasures of culture and
refinement, must give not only his eye but his life, if not his own life
that of his posterity."[16] The vulgar aim of reckless racial fertility
is no longer within our reach and no longer commends itself as worthy.
It is not consonant with the stage of civilization we are at the moment
passing through. The higher task is now ours of the regenerati