holding the view that environment had more to do with the building up of character than heredity had to do with its decadence.  How much or how little truth there is in the cynical observation that the only believers in heredity nowadays are the fathers of very clever sons I am not prepared to say.  I do say, however, that with the cruel and hopeless law of heredity as laid down by Zola and Ibsen I have little sympathy.  According to these pessimists, who ride heredity to death, we inherit only the vices, the weaknesses, and the diseases of our ancestors.  If this, however, were really the case, the world would be growing worse and not better, as it assuredly is, with every succeeding generation.  The contrary view taken of the matter by Ibsen’s fellowcountryman, Bjornsen, appears to me to be so much more commonsense and humanizing.  He holds that if we know that our ancestors drank and gambled to excess, or were violent-tempered or immoral, we can quite easily avoid the pitfall, knowing it to be there.  Too readily wrongdoers are prepared to lay their failings at the door of ancestors, society, or some other blamable source, instead of attributing them, as they should do, to their own selfish and weak indulgence and lack of self-control.  Heredity, though an enormous factor in our constitution, need not be regarded as an over-mastering fate, for each human being has an almost limitless parentage to draw upon.  Each child has both a father and a mother, and two grandparents on both sides, increasing as one goes back.  But, besides drawing on a much wider ancestry than the immediate parents, we have more than we inherit, or where could the law of progress operate?  Each generation, each child who is born, comes into a slightly different world, fed by more experience, blown upon by fresh influences.  And each individual comes into the world, not with a body merely, but with a soul; and this soul is susceptible to impressions, not only from the outer material world but from the other souls also impressed by the old and the new, by the material and the ideal.

“The History of the Jukes” is continually cited as proving the power and force of heredity.  Most people who read the book through, however, instead of merely accepting allusions one-sided and defective to it, see clearly that it forms the strongest argument for change of environment that ever was brought forward.  The assumed name of Jukes is given to the descendants of a worthless woman who emigrated to America upwards of a century and a half ago, and from whom hundreds of criminals, paupers, and prostitutes have descended.  But how were the Jukes’ descendants dealt with during this period?  No helping hand removed the children from their vicious and criminal surroundings known as one of the crime-cradles of the State of New York.  Neither church nor school took them under its protecting care.  Born and reared in the haunts of vice and crime, nothing but viciousness and criminality could be expected as a result.