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to individual than for a century before security-holders, pensioners, insurancethe outbreak of the war.

The situation may be summarized as follows: The war has made it much more difficult for an individual to transmit his acquired real-estate and bank balances to his son. But the war has encouraged on an enormous scale the transmission of a man's wealth to nondescendants of his body. It is a phenomenon frequently hinted at in the two familiar epithets- the New Rich and the New Poor. Let us see.

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To what purposes do Governments devote the taxes which they derive from their citizens and by which said citizens are rendered more or less incapable of transmitting said wealth to their descendants? The great bulk of taxes everywhere goes to paying interest on the national debts piled up during the war. But if such vast debts exist, these debts must be held somewhere. In other words, there must be somewhere a great body of wealth. And there is. It is in the hands of the New Rich or of the Richer-than-Ever. All over Europe millions of the so-called middle class, and particularly millions of the so-called brainworkers and fixed income owners, are paying interest on bonds which other people hold. In a very real sense they have transmitted and are still transmitting their wealth to the fortunate bondholders. If they have no property characteristics left to transmit to their children, it is because they have handed over or are busy handing over those property-character

istics to utter strangers.

This process is best studied in Germany. By far the greater part of the property characteristics acquired through generations by millions of humbly well-off and moderately welloff Germans - small property owners,

beneficiaries, professional and intellectual workers has been transmitted through the devaluation of the German mark to the Stinneses and others of their kind who have profited enormously by these same worthless marks. In Germany there is not even the poor consolation that the losses of one great class have been the gain of another comparatively large class. The German national debt has been repudiated and the so-called owners of fixed incomes have seen their incomes fixed at zero. In Germany the transmission of wealth along lines of non-kinship has been from the pockets of the very many to the pockets of the very few.

That, of course, is not altogether a new phenomenon. Revolutions, whether political, social, or religious, have a way of transmitting the property characteristics of one class to another class. Henry VIII of England transmitted a very notable accumulation of realestate characteristics from the monasteries to the nobles; and the latter supplemented the process by transmitting to themselves the acquired land-characteristics of the English peasantry through the ingenious system of enclosures. Tucked away in a book which one would least suspect of cynicism, in L'Abbé Constantin, there is one brief sentence that completely covers the case. Frenchmen, remarks M. Halévy, insist on having revolution once in every generation because that is the most expeditious way of redistributing the wealth of a nation.

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partly justifying Lamarck and partly repudiating him. Sometimes we see in the same individual certain traits true to Lamarck and other traits belying him. This particular phase of the conflict between Lamarck and anti-Lamarck is strongly manifested in one section of the middle classes upon which the world has bestowed a great amount of commiseration and an infinitesimal amount of concrete relief. I refer to the so-called white-collar workers.

The white-collar proletariat to-day is at the same time the victim of traits that strongly insist on getting themselves inherited and of others that are becoming increasingly difficult to pass on to one's issue. The Standard of Living is one of the acquired characteristics which normally exerts an almost irresistible urge to pass on from father to son. To be sure, in the war countries of Europe that urge has been largely overcome by a hostile environment. The white-collar masses of Europe have been driven to accept for their children a standard based on less food and clothes, poorer housing, less education, and, in pretty nearly every other way, a lowered material and spiritual life. But here at home the white-collar population has held to its living standard, though at extraordinary sacrifices. There has been a fierce insistence, in the face of the famous Cost of Living, upon maintaining the American level of cleanly and seemly habitation and dress, and of full opportunity for education all for transmittal to one's children. In the matter of food, I imagine, there has been practised a drastic thrift in order to make possible that dignity of home and dress which does go far to make the man. The clerk and the school-teacher eat less and hang longer hours on a subway strap in order to find an airier and more self-respecting apartment house at the end of the day and the trip.

Decent living, then, will remain a transmissible characteristic in the United States; but it will persist at the sacrifice of the transmissibility of that other acquired trait property. To be sure, that trait was never highly developed among the white-collar workers. Their income has never been of a size to stimulate large-scale accumulation and transmission; yet something there was. That something, I imagine, has now been brought down close to the vanishing point.

Of course, the white-collar man does one other thing. Faced with the growing difficulty of transmitting property to his children, the white-collar man has been remorselessly cutting down the number of his children. But that is too big a subject to enter upon here.

Chips and Blocs. Until recently, perhaps the strongest case for Lamarck in the entire range of human experience was to be found in the sphere of American politics. No acquired human trait was so regularly transmitted from father to son as the Party label. Minnesota and Vermont on the one hand, and South Carolina and Louisiana on the other, have been with us always to show how a voting habit acquired about the year 1860 can become virtually imbedded in the germ plasm. It was a phenomenon which in Great Britain had been observed and recorded half a century ago by W. S. Gilbert when he formulated the Lamarckian thesis that every little boy born in England is either a little Liberal or a little Conservative.

In England it is now plain that, for the time being, Lamarckism is bankrupt. Twenty years ago the appearance of twenty-nine Labor members in the House of Commons showed that the Liberal characteristic was ceasing to be transmitted among a considerable portion of the population. To-day a Labor ministry is in power, backed up

by something like one hundred and ninety members in the House of Commons, and by almost five million voters in the country. People believe the day is not far away when the Labor Party will have an absolute majority in the country and in Parliament. Nor is it the Liberal characteristic alone that has been failing to get itself inherited. The Conservative Party is swinging away from Lamarck. In the last General Election it was demonstrated that Prime Minister Baldwin had failed to transmit his Conservatism to his son, who was active on the Labor side. More recently a son of Lord Curzon has shed the paternal characteristic and gone Labor. And any force in nature which can work its will upon Lord Curzon is, as one might say in nonscientific circles, 'some' force.

But, as we have seen, natural law is capable of startling reversals. Will the Labor characteristic, now being rapidly acquired by the British people, be transmitted to succeeding generations of voters? Or may we at any moment expect a reversion from Ramsay MacDonald to Asquith and Winston Churchill? Opinions differ.

In this country, it is the Republican Party that is chiefly affected by the anti-Lamarckian drift. Republican insurgency has become chronic, which is another way of saying that more Republican fathers than Democratic fathers are failing to transmit their acquired characteristics, as of the year 1860, to their sons. Over the greater part of the Republican area the reaction from Lamarck has gone only as far as the development of Progressives and Farm Blocs. But at the moment of writing, the chances of a Third Party out of the loins of the Republican Party is being seriously discussed.

Whether that Third Party comes or not, it is obvious that the farmer of the Republican West is sloughing off what

is unquestionably the outstanding trait among acquired Republican characteristics. And that is the Tariff. The Tariff urge is still strong; but the zeal with which the Western farmer is striving to acquire other traits, such as coöperative marketing, Government loans, and freight-rate reduction, suggests that the Tariff trait may yet disappear out of the germ plasm of the Republican farmer.

If that should ever come to pass, it will be a disaster of the first magnitude for Lamarck. For hitherto, in this case of the farmer and the Tariff, Lamarck has been vindicated even beyond his fondest dreams. Lamarck believed that acquired characteristics are transmitted from generation to generation to the extent that such characteristics are useful to the individual. But the Tariff offers us the remarkable case of the transmission of an acquired characteristic which has been neither useful nor convenient to those farmer generations which have inherited it and passed it on in turn. The farmer sells his products in the markets of the world. By all dictates of reason he should insist on being allowed to buy in a free world-market. In other words, the farmer should, by nature, be an anti-Protectionist. But it so happened that the Western farmer acquired his Republicanism with his Nationalism during the Civil War period, and he took his Republicanism straight, including the Tariff. As a Republican he has continued to vote Tariff, even though that acquired characteristic has repeatedly got between his legs and tripped him. But, as I have said, we are now apparently facing a change.

III

The Minuet and the Trot. Mr. Minnegerode has recently told us how seriously civilization in the New York of

the 1840's found itself threatened by two formidable invasions from the other side of the water. These were the waltz and the polka. The pillars of a social structure grounded in the chaste figures of the square dance began visibly to totter. But the younger set of 1840 went its way, and somehow life triumphed over the disintegrating forces from the banks of the Danube and the Vistula; triumphed over them and assimilated them. For what do we find? This: seventy years later, a civilization seemingly rooted in the waltz and in the schottische, close kin to the polka, discovered its foundations to be crumbling under the onset of the tango, the turkey-trot, and its affiliated zoological dances. In the swing of human evolution around the circle, it may be confidently predicted that some day a civilization based on the trot, the hug, the toddle, and the shiver, will stand on the defensive against the menace of the quadrille and the minuet.

And if the reader will only be kind enough to substitute for my technical dance terms such terms as religion, science, morals, manners, politics, economics, books, pictures, music, he will be dispensing with a great many additional paragraphs in these necessarily condensed laboratory-notes.

Why do the young go in for the waltz when their elders practise the quadrille? Why will they revive the minuet when their elders have been won over to the fox-trot? Obviously because they are young and their elders are old. In other words: Youth is the strongest anti-Lamarckian force we know of. Every generation makes it its business to scrutinize the acquired characteristics of the preceding generation in order to reject them. Youth holds the Heights of the Meuse against the acquired traits of its fathers and cries, "They shall not pass!' Youth insists on acquiring its own set of characteristics. There is not the

least use in warning Youth that its own turn is bound to come and that, twentyfive years from now, five years from now, the young of 1924 will be receiving their stiff dose of the anti-Lamarckian medicine from the young of 1949. The young of 1924 profess to be delighted by the prospect. They call it progress. To-day they demand from their elders a sacrifice in the cause of progress. Twenty-five years from now they will be glad to be the sacrifice. They want to oust and are willing in their turn to be ousted. They say so now. How they will feel about it in 1949 I don't know; but I have my suspicions.

Which is the better thing for the world in the long run - that Youth should inherit its faith and ideas, or that it should create its own new set of faiths and ideas, to be replaced in turn by a newer equipment a generation hence? The present investigator, having been young in Roosevelt's first administration, believes, of course, in Lamarck. He believes that Youth should go slow in throwing over the accumulated characteristics of its predecessors. And he believes this on the basis of Youth's own favorite argument: because it makes a much more interesting fight. If each generation gets into the habit of thinking that its own ideas are valid only for itself, what sort of defense will it put up when the next generation comes swarming over the top? A man will fight desperately in defense of a heritage of ideas, but not in defense of a twenty-one years' tenancy in a certain set of ideas. Youth thinks it is calling for Struggle. But what it is really asking for is a sham stage-battle. You can't get up much of a scrap if one of the parties - the elder party — starts out with the conviction that it is going to be licked, and deserves to be.

There is one region in eastern Europe where the conflict between Lamarck and anti-Lamarck is being fought out on a

gigantic and tragic scale. Bolshevism in Russia seven years ago set out to make a clean sweep of every existing acquired characteristic: in the political, economic, and social orders; in religion; in morals; in the arts and sciences; in the very nature of Truth, which hence forth was to be true only to the extent that it was communist and proletarian. The struggle between Lamarck and Weismann in Soviet Russia is still under way; but there is really very little doubt as to the outcome. Lamarck will win. The acquired characteristics of the Russian people will once more get themselves transmitted. They are doing so already. If you need proof, take that one notable acquired characteristic of which I have spoken at some length. Property, a trait which men acquire chiefly for the purpose of transmitting it, was abolished in Soviet Russia, only to be restored. The Soviet rulers have created nothing themselves,

but have virtually been living on the wealth-characteristics acquired by past generations; and they have now discovered that the destruction of the transmissible nature of property means death for a nation. The case is even stronger for Russia's acquired cultural and spiritual capital. Space is lacking for details.

And so the writer's laboratory researches, as embodied in these notes, impel him to take his stand firmly with Vernon Kellogg in a recent number of the Atlantic. Mr. Kellogg found that in spite of the very serious case that can be built up against Lamarck, 'many reputable and thoughtful biologists remain convinced that any satisfactory causal explanation of evolution must contain as a fundamental element some form of the Lamarckian assumption.' My only hope is that this offer of unsolicited aid and comfort on my part will not worry Mr. Kellogg too much.

COWARD'S CASTLE

BY WALTER GILKYSON

JUDGE AVERY held his pencil poised above the typewritten page of testimony, then marked the margin with a long firm line. He had not remembered the plaintiff's evidence was so clear; that young man had brought it out very nicely with the neat indirectness of his questions. On page forty-eight - he turned back the rustling sheets. Yes, the witness had said about the same thing. With a faint smile of satisfaction he leaned over and began

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writing on the pad that lay upon the book-rest of his easy-chair.

For a moment he paused to read what he had written, the pencil trembling slightly in his thin blueveined hand; there was a look of critical appraisal in his worn face, something vivid, keenly alive, beneath the bloodless texture of his skin. He struck out a word, replaced it with another; the wrinkle between his eyebrows deepened and he smoothed the white hair

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