death,''the yellow, the blue, the red,' 'the purple path of my sufferings amid the lilac-coloured sands of life'; in heavy smells, as heliotrope, vanilla, musk and apple. Everything appears tremulous' (zybki) to their eyes. They are subject to recurrent pseudoanamnesia, the feeling that 'all this has happened before.' This condition, associated in most of us with slight dyspepsia, is translated by them into the world of ideas; and from it arises a belief in scenes and faces that repeat themselves. Their plays are full of the idea of doubles,' Doppelgänger; rivals and predestined lovers are doubles; 'to escape doubles' is one of Blok's preoccupations. The first act of his 'Stranger' is a pseudoanamnesic preparation for the third.

Passion, which is subjective, replaces affection, which is for an external object. The notion of beauty is corrupted, and loses its objective significance. ZinovyevaAnnibal's Anna has heavy dark-red hair, a pale face, 'almost green'; there is no blood in her body; only her lips are red, hungry, burning, calling.' All this writer's women are pale; they stretch out their hands to the sun, to the sea, to passing strangers; they lay them on people's heads. Her men have distended nostrils and smell all manner of smells; they love with the fury of buffaloesit is her own comparison. Love is inseparable from anguish. His kisses are sweet and agonising; they are as terrible as torture.' · Happy love is terrifying; there is a foretaste of death in it' (Zinovyeva-Annibal). He went to love as to the stake; he laid his head on her bosom as on the block' (Brusof). From this the way is not far to Sadic excitements and an unholy delight in pain, tumult, fear and death. A very real thing this in Russia nowadays, and not confined to writers, as witness Vadim the Vampire and the St Petersburg Suicide Club. Solipsism is a widespread social malady. Small wonder that the leading personages in these plays are all so poorly! They lean against posts; they faint; they are wrapped in railway rugs and carried about from place to place by the minor characters, who are not so far gone.

But this is only the pathological side of a movement which cannot be neglected in an estimate of intellectual

* For other instances see Tchukovsky, p. 219.

forces. For it is the ultimate consequence of a passionate sincerity of thought of which we have very little in England. While we amble safely down the beaten tracks, the Russians go helter-skelter across country with a recklessness that is altogether heroic; and the result is a literature of an intensity and originality hardly paralleled in any other age or country. If I have laid stress on the aberrations of the movement, on the runaways and their adventures in the ditches, it is because the contemplation of them enables us to characterise more clearly the general direction of the rest. Every artist is subject, more or less, to this sort of mental decomposition. The perfectly well-balanced nature does not speculate, it acts. Without detachment, a hermitage and self-analysis, there can be no creative art.

What have we over here that we can safely put in competition with the recent dramatic literature of Russia? Our favourite playwrights, the Sutros, the Maughams, the Pineros, are too healthy, too well-balanced to come creditably out of the comparison. They are men of action who have taken entertainment for their sphere to the kindly end of refreshing other men of action when the day's work is done. One turns rather to less popular namesHankin, Lady Gregory, Bennett, Barker, Davidson, Yeats, Martyn, Synge and Shaw (another unmistakable solipsist, by the by). These have all done fine work; but they have not travelled so far away from the common track, not revealed such vistas or explored such penetralia as the Russians; nor have any of them attained such mastery of their medium as Tchekhof or Sologub. Thank God! says the well-balanced man.

GEORGE CALDERON.

Art. 3.-THE STUDY OF EUGENICS.

1. Natural Inheritance. Hereditary Genius. By F. Galton. London: Macmillan, 1889, 1892.

2. The Germ Plasm (Walter Scott, 1893). The Evolution Theory (Two vols. Arnold, 1904). Essays upon Heredity, etc. (Two vols. Clarendon Press, 1891). By A. Weismann. 3. Heredity. By J. A. Thomson. London: Murray, 1908. 4. Mental Deficiency. By A. F. Tredgold. London:

Baillière, 1908.

5. The Family and the Nation. Heredity and Society. By W. C. D. and C. D. Whetham. London: Longmans, 1909, 1912.

6. Mendel's Principles of Heredity. By W. Bateson. Cambridge: University Press, 1909.

7. Variation, Heredity and Evolution. By R. H. Lock. London: Murray, 1909.

8. Public Health and Social Conditions. Local Government Board [Cd 4671]. London: Wymans, 1909.

9. Heredity and Selection in Sociology. Race Progress and Race Degeneracy. By G. C. Hill. London: Black, 1909.

10. The Eugenics Review. Vols I-IV. London: Eugenics Education Society,* 1909-1912.

THE immediate causes of the growth and decay of nations have been many and varied. At a period when competition has been keen and when several nations have been strenuously contending for supremacy, the fortune of war, the chance of the day, the advent of famine or pestilence, have been sufficient to turn the scale against one people and in favour of another, and so to alter the course of the world's history. In other instances progression or retrogression has been determined by the form of government and the capacity or incapacity of rulers; and examples are not wanting in which the ship of state has been driven upon the rocks by the ignorance or rapacity of those at the helm. But, while factors such as these

* 6 York Buildings, Adelphi, W.C. Reference may also be made to the Report of the Royal Commission on the Feeble-minded [Cd 4202; 1898]; to that on the Poor Laws [Cd 4499; 1909]; and to the annual Reports of the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages, of the Lunacy Commissioners, and of the Local Government Board.

may determine, and often have determined, the final overthrow of a nation, they rarely seem to have been the essential cause of national decay.

The history of the human race points to the origin of progress and decline as being much more deeply seated. Advance is dependent upon the gradual evolution of new functions whereby adaptation is secured to an ever-increasing complexity of environment; and, if a people are but strong and vigorous, they appear able to retain their capacity for development under the most adverse conditions. Neither oppression nor misgovernment, nor pestilence, famine, or the sword, nothing indeed short of actual extermination, will prevent that development taking place when the conditions again become favourable. On the other hand, history shows that, if this inherent vitality be materially diminished, if a people lose their initiative and strength of character and become degenerate, then, whatever their wealth and culture, their doom as a nation is irrevocably sealed. It is impossible to doubt that the fundamental cause of national success or failure, progress or decadence, survival or extinction, lies, not in a nation's wealth, its culture, its trade, its government, laws, religion, or social institutions-for these are but means to an end-but in the potentiality for development, in the vitality and state of health, in what may be termed the biological fitness,' of the people themselves.

This point cannot be insisted upon too strongly, for, although it is a fact which is at last receiving recognition, it is yet one of which the full significance has by no means been perceived. The important question which confronts every nation is, Are the people showing themselves possessed of, or lacking in, the capacity to advance? are they biologically fit'? In view of the course of history and of the fate which has befallen every supreme nation in the past, this question becomes of vital importance to one which to-day occupies a foremost place; and hence I propose to consider briefly the present condition of the people of England.

Statistics of mortality are commonly adduced as evidence of the vitality or otherwise of a nation; and, in regard to these, the England of to-day probably compares favourably with that of any earlier period. During the

quinquennium 1861-65 the average annual death-rate of England and Wales per thousand persons living was 21.4. Since then it has steadily declined, until in the year 1911 it stood at 14.6. The greatest decline has been in the case of children under five years of age; but there have been fewer deaths at all ages up to 55, and the average expectation of life of the whole community has been considerably increased.

It would be extremely fallacious, however, to conclude that a diminished death-rate is any indication of an increased power of resistance to disease and an improvement in the inherent vitality of a people. We have to remember that during the past fifty years enormous advances have been made in the science of preventive medicine as well as in medical and surgical treatment; and an examination of mortality statistics makes it perfectly clear that it is to these causes, rather than to any heightened vitality of the people themselves, that this decline is due. For instance, between 1850 and 1908 the mortality rate from consumption declined to the extent of 65 per cent. From 1871 to 1908 the deathrate from smallpox fell from 410 to 2 per million; that from scarlet fever from 758 to 91; that from typhoid from 373 to 78, while typhus practically became extinct. It will be observed that all these diseases belong to the microbic group; and it is unquestionably in diseases of this kind that the great reduction in mortality has taken place. It is here that preventive medicine has made such enormous strides; and there cannot be the slightest doubt that the death-rate has declined, not because the nation is more resistant to disease, but because modern science has lessened its incidence and modern skill in treatment has diminished its fatality.

It may be argued, however, that since disease not only kills but also produces disablement of those who survive, the diminution of its prevalence must of necessity tend to an improvement in the nation's vitality and efficiency. If this were the case, if the vitality of the people had really become augmented, we should expect to find them less prone to sickness, whereas it is a remarkable and important fact that, in spite of the diminished death-rate and of the lessened prevalence of many diseases, the average rate of illness has been steadily increasing for