Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: i i ,: PREFATORY NOTE This lecture was delivered in Newcastle on .Vvl November 19, 1900, to the members of the Literary and Philosophical Society. At the time of writing and delivering it the South African War and its lessons were far more omnipresent in thought and feeling than, perhaps unfortunately, they are to-day. The wave of emotion which for a time roused , the nation to self-consciousness has passed, scouring out very little of our stagnant back- waters in the process. It is possibly with a nation as with an individual—both feel only intensely and are only capable of vigorous self-reform in moments of unwonted stress, or of novel spiritual experience. Still, in J viii Prefatory Note quieter moments it is worth while endeavouring to bring home to the thoughtful that no community of men can trust blindly to heredity to preserve their racial characters. Every nation is an agglomeration of good and bad elements, and each new generation is born from but a relatively small portion of the whole. The greatness of a nation depends on the dominant fertility of its fitter stocks, and fluctuates with the extent of this dominance. Love of ease, a mistaken sense of duty, insidious new social habits, may tamper with the preponderating fertility of the fitter and more capable racial constituents before we have realized their effects. Some only of these things can be touched by the legislator; in the aggregate they are subject jJone to social feeling and to an enlightened /national pride. Is it possible to arouse a consciousness in the folk that the parentage of the next generation is not a personal but a national problem ?—that a nation which has . ' 1 : ceased to insure that its better elements have a dominant fertility has destroyed itself far more effectua...