and managed show-house in all large cities. The motion-picture industry for the entire world is run from two centers, New York and Hollywood. Hoarily conservative banks are opening branches by the hundreds and controlling loans through them over the telephone. Newspapers, once the stronghold of powerful personalities, are now massing into a few huge systems and operated by a small board of directors, aided by half a dozen high-salaried executives and writers. And so on everywhere in the realm of organization and action. One man of superior mentality or superior efficiency is now doing the work formerly done by a score of such men. The Biological Bloc must have heard of all these facts. They are commonplaces in the news. But the Bloc has failed to sense the bearing this trend has upon the upbreeding of brains. It has not discovered that as the sphere of influence of a highgrade mind widens, relatively fewer high-grade minds are needed to run the world. In olden times, when there were only rutty highways, no postal service, no telephones, and no radio, every village needed a first-class merchant, a first-class teacher, a firstclass physician, and so on. With each notable improvement in transportation and communication, this local need diminished. One first-class One first-class man for each county was enough; then one for four or five counties; and now, in some lines of endeavor, one for each nation is quite enough. One elocutionist with the right collection of bedtime stories can now lull to sleep all the infants of North America, thanks to radio broadcasting. And one clergyman can produce the same effect on ten million parishioners in ten thousand towns and hamlets, of a Sunday morning. I have heard of a board of directors which holds weekly meetings over the long-distance telephone, with all the members in different cities. Of such centralization there is no end in sight. And it means a steadily dwindling demand for the Best Minds in work which demands their highest abilities. Beloved subjects, this last qualification is most important. Highgrade minds will, of course, always be in demand. They will always be preferred for a wide variety of positions and responsibilities. But if the work they do does not serve as an adequate outlet for their strongest and highest drives, they will eventually become dissatisfied, cramped, thwarted, and perhaps gravely maladjusted. One of the unhappiest, surliest men I know is now vice-president of a large metropolitan bank. He receives a salary of twenty-five thousand a year or thereabouts. He is associated with brilliant and influential men. He enjoys the best society and personal prestige. And he has a comfortable private income from the money he received from the big bank when it bought out his own small one some years ago and converted it into a branch office. Why should he be such a grouch? cause his new job is a sinecure. is a thousand-horse-power motor pulling a load which any donkeyengine could handle. Half of the time he is idling. And when he is not idling, he is deciding matters which were child's play for him twenty years ago. He had built up Be He his own bank with joy. He had made a go of it because the task gave him free vent for all his mental and physical powers. As vice-president of a big bank, he is simply one of a score of high-grade executives. This is typical of the fate of many superior men to-day. It will be typical of many, many more of them in years to come. As long as centralized organizing continues, the percentage of Best Minds which must do work far below their abilities is certain to increase. Beloved subjects! A century ago the world could have used one Best Mind per hundred of population perhaps. Twenty-five years ago it could have used one per thousand. To-day I To-day I doubt if it can use one for every ten thousand. A generation hence, if things go on as they now are going, the world may find difficulty in using one for every hundred thousand people. According to one of his friends, Herbert Hoover has estimated that all the genuine creative and managerial work in all activities in the United States, including education and social service, is done by fewer than two hundred and fifty thousand persons. That would work out at the rate of one Best Mind to every 460 of population. I once quoted this estimate to the late E. W. Scripps, a widely read, studious, and well informed journalist. He grunted contemptuously. "A quarter-million?" said he. "Nonsense! This country's head-work is all done by a few hundred men and maybe three or four women. It is, if you're talking about constructive thinking. And we get along pretty well at that." Now, what is the use of breeding more first-class brains, if the very ability of brains already at work tends to reduce the relative number that can be put to work to capacity? Would not such a eugenical program simply add to our burden of discontent? Would we not be overwhelmed by gray hordes of neurotics, hypochondriacs, and murderous malcontents? What is more perilous than an intellectual proletariat? What can cause more trouble than a highly intelligent man who has been trained far beyond his opportunities? Better an army of morons than that! For the morons are at least healthy and contented. And is not contentment in a sound body more to be desired than a defeated intelligence? The black pessimism and intellectual unrest throughout Central Europe before the World War was, as some observers noted long ago, largely the inevitable result of breeding thousands of superior minds in lands where opportunity for them was lacking. Just before the World War broke out, many graduates from the best engineering schools in Germany were being paid wages about equal to those received by street-car conductors, while well trained physicians were fighting off starvation. Ten good men struggled for each job offering a chance to a high-grade, technically trained worker. Should we wonder that when 1914 dawned various radical political parties were swiftly gaining the upper hand all over Germany? Big-brain culture became a world menace within a few decades. It will become that again and again, unless we learn to regulate it as cautiously as we regulate the manufacture of high explosives and deadly poisons. TNT is a feeble detonator as compared with a thwarted intelligence. And potassium cyanide is a soft drink beside it. The cash value of a good laboratory worker, of an electrical engineer, of a chemist, of a lawyer, of a physician, and of many another superior technician is already declining in our own land. And when cash value drops, opportunities narrow. The psychic consequences of thwarted intelligence are already appearing, though faintly as yet. Our colleges, faculty and students alike, are growing acidly critical of Things as They Are. Our ablest fictionists are turning from sugary idealism to bitter realistic studies. Our most intelligent bankers, manufacturers, and farmers grow more merciless in their condemnation of our laws and customs. But, above all, thousands of intelligent men and women are becoming criminals, with full knowledge and full self-approval of their act. All this, I take it, indicates a profound maladjustment between these superior individuals and their social surroundings. How much of it is due to sheer lack of adequate opportunity? I guess a good deal of it is. An intelligent man may be trusted to find an opening for his abilities, if there is any within his range of observation. If he does not find it, the odds are great that the chance does not exist. Hundreds of thousands of school-teachers and ministers earn less than dish-washers. Will anybody maintain that the teachers and ministers could find much better jobs at which they could use their minds to capacity? It is unthinkable. The Biological Bloc will secretly denounce me for all these views. They will assure you, beloved subjects, that I am opposing the improvement of the human race. They will call me a traitor to eugenics and to progress. But the opposite is the truth. It is they who are standing in the way of genuine progress. It is they who, if allowed to have their way, will wreck every sound eugenical program. They urge us to adopt their New Decalogue of Science, which would forbid us to protect the weak, to keep the sick alive, to allow moron parents to bear moron children, and to improve physical conditions in homes and cities and asylums. In this New Decalogue they say that "all noblehearted but soft-headed schemes for ameliorating the conditions of life have failed and will fail to improve the race; and are in fact hastening its deterioration." Hence we should return to a policy of harshness; we must make the environment sterner, and we must prevent the breeding of softlings. Back to the rugged hairy man of the cave! Down with the frills and coddlings of our pervert civilization! Beloved subjects! We shall next undertake to prove that amelioration never has failed to improve the race. We shall show that it is not harming it now. That done, we shall make clear to you that the world does not need a New Decalogue so much as it needs a New Testament of Science founded on faith, hope, and charity. Faith that man can work out his own salvation. Hope that in our time we shall not be swept to ruin by our own natural impulses. And, above all, charity toward all freaks and fanatics who, like ourselves, are products of that same Nature which brings forth maniacs, newspaper columnists, deaf-mutes, aldermen, saxophone players, thugs, priests, statisticians, contortionists, and all the rest of that hurly-burly which calls itself the human race. For all these are specially hypersensitive souls. They are, in the strict sense, all abnormal, deviating in some respect from that stale normality which is the curse of most of us. They are the hope of the race. For only out of a higher abnormality can a better normal man arise. What that consists of, it shall be our next task to show. (Next month: Sensitivity and Progress) HEROD WILLIAM E. BROOKS And so the Magic-worker comes at last! Three years he's shown his wondrous might to men. He stood and looked and answered not a word. T ON PATROL MARTIN ARMSTRONG HE AIR in the dugout was flat, stale, and earthy, and neither warm nor cool. A single candle burned on a table, shedding a melancholy light which hardly hardly reached to the walls of the square, low-roofed room. Along one of the walls ran a rough wooden structure, like a large, three-storied rabbithutch open in front, which comprised three sleeping-bunks. The beds were shallow hammocks of wire netting, stapled along each edge to the wooden framework. The two upper bunks were empty except for a blanket and a kit-bag; in the bottom one lay a young man rolled up in a brown blanket with a coat thrown over his feet. Nothing was exposed except his brown head and a fraction of khaki shoulder. His name was Freen, and he was a platoon commander. homeless sensation which comes with returning nightfall in the line, and at the thought of it Freen felt it too. He had been trying to get a little sleep before 8:30, when it was his duty to take out a patrol consisting of a sergeant and eight men, to examine the state of the German wire. But he could not sleep. He lay with his eyes closed, trying to keep his mind empty beds empty of thought; and when thoughts came none the less, he opened his eyes and stared with a sort of sick hatred at the crass reality of the things that stood before him. Like some hateful being that no effort of his could make to flinch, each thing stared back at him, loathsome and oppressive in its inescapable familiarity. Time after time he fell into a brief doze, from which he woke to a sense of something that oppressed his mind like a physical weight; and with wearying reiteration, as his mind cleared, he once again found himself faced by the impending patrol. It was horrible. Freen was not a coward. He was just as able as any of his fellow-officers to disguise his feelings under a calm exterior, and now he had not the smallest doubt that when the moment arrived he would be perfectly competent to carry out the job. In fact, he kept wishing that the moment would arrive. It was the suspense that was so horrible— In a dugout it is always night. There that sense of the time of day which, under normal life, a man derives intuitively from his varied routine, and the degree of light or darkness, is lost. Time has stood still, it seems, at some unknown hour not far from midnight. Young Freen opened his eyes and, shaking a wrist clear of the blanket, saw that his watch was near upon seven o'clock. Up above, the sun must have set an hour ago; the men in the trench would be feeling that desolate, |