What is the reason for this?  Is it the result of blind chance, of accidents that have left certain races and families isolated in stagnant eddies from which some sudden current of a whimsical tide might sweep them out into the full flood of progress, until they then overtook and passed their hitherto successful rivals, who, in their turn, would drift off into progressive incompetence and degeneracy?  Biology does not look with enthusiasm on the methods of chance and accident.  The choice and transmission of the forty-eight chromosomes that give to each individual his character-potential are probably in accordance with some obscure biological law through which the unfathomable divine will operates.  Now these chromosomes may be selected and combined after a fashion, and with a persistence of continuity, that would guarantee character-potential, for good or for ill, through many generations, or they might be so varied in their combinations that no distinct traits would be carried over from one generation to another.  As a matter of experience all these three processes take place and are recorded in families of distinct quality, good, bad and indifferent.  If the character-potential is predetermined, then manifestly education and environment can play only the subordinate part of fostering its development or retarding it.

In the same way the character and career of the various races of men are determined by the potential inherent in the individuals and families that compose them, and like them the races themselves are for long periods marked by power and capacity or weakness and lack of distinction.  There are certain races, such as the Hottentot, the Malay, the American Indian, and mixed bloods, as the Mexican peons and Mongol-Slavs of a portion of the southeastern Europe, that, so far as recorded history is concerned, are either static or retrogressive.  There are family units, poverty-stricken and incompetent, in Naples, Canton, East Side New York; or opulent and aggressive in West Side New York, in Birmingham, Westphalia, Pittsburgh, that are no more subject to the cultural and character-creating influences of education and environment—­beyond a certain definite point—­than are the amphibians of Africa or the rampant weeds of my garden.

This is a hard saying and a provocative.  The entire course of democratic theory, of humanitarian thought and of the popular type of scientific speculation stands against it, and the Christian religion as well, unless the statement itself is guarded by exact definitions.  If the contention of the scientific materialist were correct, and the thing that makes man, and that Christians call the immortal soul, were but the result of physical processes of growth and differentiation, then slavery would be justifiable, and exploitation a reasonable and inevitable process.  Since, however, this assumption of materialism is untenable, and since all men are possessed of immortal souls between which is no distinction in the sight of God, the situation, regrettable if you like, is one which at the same time calls for the exercise of a higher humanitarianism than that so popular during the last generation, and as well for a very drastic revision of contemporary political and social and educational methods.