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Show 14(3 147 "\Vhat profit that (1111' galleys ride. l‘ine-forestdike, on every main? lx‘nin and wreck are at our side, Grim warders ol the House of l‘ain. "\Vhere are the brave. the strong. the fleet? \\'here is our English chivalry? \Vild grasses are their burial-sheet, And sobbing waves their threnody." "Peace. peace! we wrong the noble dead To vex their solemn slumber so: Though childless. and with thorn-crowned bead. Up the steep road must [England go." 3u" 111W111N mum It suggests the inevitable end of all empire. of all dominion of man over man by force of arms. More than all who fall in battle or are wasted in the camps. the nation misses the "fair women and brave men" who should have been the descendants of the strong and the manly. 11 we may personify the spirit of the nation, it grieves most not over its unreturning brave,vy but overabose who might have been but never were, and who. so long as history lasts. can never be. It w as at Lexington that "the embattled farmers" "tired the shot heard round the worl 1." To them life was of less value than a principle. the principle written by Cromwell on the statute book of Parliament: "All just powers under God are derived from the consent of the people." Since the war of the Revolution many patriotic societies have arisen in the 1'11ited States. These may be typified by the association of the "Sons of the Revolution" . 0115 of American \Vars," societies which find their and of the 11‘ inspiration in the persmtal descent of their members from those who fought for American independence. The assumption, well justified by facts, is that Revolutionary fathers were a superior type of man, and that to have had such names in otir personal ancestry is of itself a cause for thinking more highly of our: selves. In our little private round of peaceful duties we feel that we 111igbt have wrought the deeds of T'utnam and Allen, of Marion and Greene, of our Revolutionary ancestors. whoever they may have been. But if those who survived were nobler than the mass, so also were those who fell. 11 we go over the record of brave men and wise women whose fathers fought at Lexington. we must think also of the men and women who shall never be, whose right to exist was cut short at this same battle. It is a costly thing to kill off men, for in men alone and the sons of men can national greatness consist. But sometimes there is no other alternative. War is sometimes inevitable. It is sometimes necessary, sometimes even righteous. It happened once in our history that for "every drop of blood drawn by the lash another must be drawn by the sword," It cost us six hundred and fifty thousand lives to get rid of slav- ery. And this number, almost a million, North and South, was the "best that the nation could bring." North and South, the nation was impoverished by the loss. The gaps they left are filled, to all appearance. There are relatively few of us lelt today in whose hearts the scars of forty years ago are still unhealing. But a new generation has grown up of men and women born since the war. They have taken the nation's problems into their hands, bttt theirs are hands not so strong or so cl *an as though the men that are stood shoulder to shoulder with the men that might have been. The men that died in "the weary time" had better stuff in them than the father of the average man of today. "\Yare are not paid for in war times: the bill comes later." By the law of probabilities as developed by (311etelet. there will appear in each generation the same number of potential poets. artists, investigators, patriots, athletes and superior men of each degree. But this law involves the theory of continuity of paternity. that in each generation a percentage practically equal 111' 1111111 111' superior force or superior 111entality should survive 11' 1:11:11 the responsibilities 111' parenthood. Otherwise Quetelet's law becomes subject to the operation of another law, the, operation of 1‘eveize11 selection. or the biological "law of diminishing returns." 111 other words, breeding from an interior stock is the sole agency in raci(leterioratimt, as selection natural or artitieial along one line 111‘ another is the sole agency in race progress. And all laws of probabilities and of averages are subject 11a still higher law, the primal law of biology, which no crows |