thereof, but on the basis of dominating mind or dominating heart, or a combination of the two, which stands preeminent among such qualities in the man of a given day. In other words, refusing to adopt Mr. Cram's vague and indefinite criterion of greatness and leadership, I have chosen to hew to the line and adopt some basis which is more concrete and tangible than human passion and bias. The men in the presidency whom I have mentioned as great and as supporting the idea that great political leaders, like everything else, appear at certain times in the cycle of our evolution, possessed that innate power of mind or heart, or both, which probably all thinking men would agree is great. That such men in the presidency may often have failed to carry out their programs of action does not, in my opinion, detract one whit from the real quality of greatness which they possessed. The intellectuals of a given period know it of the great in their own period; the ordinary man does not know it until years have passed, and until from the symplastic mass of circumstances in which a leader has been enveloped, time has removed the clogging and blurring mass of undifferentiated material and left clearly in view the outstanding, dominant figure. This has proved to be true of all the great presidents mentioned above up to the time of Cleveland. Even a few brief years have proved it to be true of Cleveland, and the same will probably be true of Wilson in due course.

Mr. Cram launches into other fields of human thought and activity to prove the baneful effects of democracy. The conditions which he imagines have produced the Caillaux and La Follettes he deems answerable also for what he assumes to be the lack of dominant figures in religion, like St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Bernard, St. Francis, St. Catherine of Siena, or even like Luther, Calvin, or John Wesley. Here, again, the standard of judgment must, of necessity, count for so much that it seems ludicrous to try to prove so sweeping a dogmatism

as that which forms Mr. Cram's chief thesis. There are, unquestionably, in our religious circles of today, persons of equal prominence and ability for leadership with those just mentioned. And only recently we have had with us Mrs. Eddy and Joseph Smith, whose followings have become numerous and powerful. By reason of the fact that others find it unnecessary to start new sects, and by reason of the further fact that the populace regards religion very differently than it did in bygone days, they are not brought into the limelight as were "these men of an elder age." The powerful leadership, for example, of such a man as Cardinal Gibbons was probably as great as that of Wesley, Calvin, or Luther, but his opportunities have not appeared to accentuate in the popular mind the existence of those qualities.

Likewise, in philosophy, the conditions have so changed that we can no longer expect in the philosophical world figures of an eminence which compares with that of Plato or Aristotle, since they were men who represented science as well as philosophy. When we consider the situation in science today, we can readily see where much of the ability now goes which formerly went to philosophy, and certainly there, Mr. Cram would not claim that mediocrity is the existing condition.

Since modern science is an offshoot of philosophy, it is well for the essayist, in attempting to support his thesis, to bear in mind such eminent names in science as those of J. J. Thompson, Rutherford, Poincaré, Arrhenius, De Vries, Michelson, Emil Fischer, Lorentz Einstein, Loeb, and a host of others almost, if not quite, as eminent.

Mr. Cram criticizes the situation with regard to trade unionism, and like social movements, on the ground that incompetent leaders are chosen in our labor movements. Does he know of the excellent leadership in the British labor movement, or of the fine spirit, high ideals, and cultivation, which characterize the men who are responsible for its progress?

Again, Mr. Cram tells us that we are not justified in opposing to his view the argument that we are too near the present to be proper judges of the situation. He says he is speaking of leadership, "and leadership is not posthumous." Leadership is not, of course, "posthumous," but the recognition of the quality which makes for leadership requires perspective. History shows us innumerable examples of the quality of greatness in leaders which was never recognized during their lifetime. As one of the great men in science, who is but one of the many in such a field, we may mention Willard Gibbs. To assert, as Mr. Cram does, that people entering into the activities of life about 1880 were aware of the large number of leaders among them, is merely to make an assertion without proof. Mr. Cram tells us that he has made a list of sixty names, to which he could probably add another hundred, of men who have attained greatness in his generation. Among them, he mentions Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Bismarck, Disraeli, Cavour, Wagner, Browning, William Morris, Turgenev, Stevenson, Leo XIII, Cardinal Newman, Karl Marx. It must be remembered that in mentioning such names, Mr. Cram has the benefit of perspective in practically all instances but, even in our own day, we can make a list which compares favorably with that. There are Masefield and Wells, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Thomas Hardy, Meredith, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Geikie, Arrhenius, Einstein, Emil Fischer, Lloyd George, Clémenceau, Venizelos, Foch, Allenby, the Cardinal of Malines, and scores of others.

Mr. Cram tells us that "Democracy has achieved its perfect work and has now reduced all mankind to a dead level of incapacity, where great leaders are no longer either wanted or brought into existence, while society is itself unable, of its own power as a whole, to lift itself from the nadir of its own uniformity." The wholly unjustified claims set forth can be refuted and rendered

ludicrous by a list of names of leaders in every field of human activity today that will compare very favorably with any list that Mr. Cram could produce from an earlier age and, secondly, by the observation that, even if mediocrity is in the saddle, Mr. Cram would have to prove that democracy is responsible for it. We are told, further, that the only thing which has saved the cause of the allies in the recent world war was the substitution, in certain places, of much of absolute autocratic methods for democratic methods, and this is used as an argument to prove the failure of democracy, and its inadequacy to the production of great leaders. Must we always go on gauging the greatness of a nation in its time and the greatness of its leaders by the perfection of its system of chicanery and political wirepulling which makes a world power? Even if we should grant, which I am not willing to do, that politically speaking and from the point of view of old world diplomacy, democracy is not a success, has Mr. Cram ever thought of the numerous advantages due to extremely high development which, in turn, are possible only in democratic communities? Can anything be more flagrant and more untrue than the following statement made by Mr. Cram: "The peoples are worse off than they were fifty years ago, while during the same period, government and society have become progressively more venal, less competent, and further separated from the ideals of honor, duty, and righteousness." However sad may be the political muddles which have resulted from the world war, however great our social and economic problems, however thin the veneer of civilization which covers untamed man, it seems to me that no one can, with justice and truth, assert that the ideals of "honor, and duty, and righteousness" have ever been higher than they are today. It is again astonishing to note the use by Mr. Cram of certain statements which he calls commonplaces, and which, in my opinion, are anything but that. He claims, "It is a commonplace

of sociology that the American-born son of the foreignborn immigrant of a decadent race or inferior blood, who himself had reacted to the stimulus of a new environment and unprecedented educational opportunities, is not, in general, an advance over his progenitor either in character or capacity, but rather, however great his educational acquirement, a retrogression and a return to type." Where did Mr. Cram find that kind of dogma, and by what right does he state it as a "commonplace"! It seems to be a brand of sociology which is Mr. Cram's very own and to which I can find very few people who subscribe. How does he determine what a decadent race or one of inferior blood is? What are our criteria, what are our facts? The statement is not only inaccurate; it is grotesque. The plunge of the essayist into the realm of eugenics is interesting, but his conclusions are doubtless all wrong." * With the usual incapacity of the popular mind to grasp the truths of science, Mr. Cram confuses different theories in genetics and eugenics, and derives a kind of chaotic conception which is only fitted to arouse pity; and this is the kind of material by which he is attempting to educate those who have no basis for education in those fields. Let the geneticist judge the next quotation from Mr. Cram's essay, which is really too ludicrous to deserve further comment: "Cross fertilization and the production of special and higher types thereby, is a perfectly artificial process, and however brilliant the result in the first instance, the tendency of reversion to type is inexorable. Either the result is a hybrid without power of propagation, or a precarious phenomenon tending inevitably towards a retrogression that in a few generations comes back to the normal type." How much Mr. Cram could learn from an undergraduate course in biology in any of our modern universities! When Mr. Cram speaks of sterile hybrids resulting from

* See Franz Boas' review of The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, by Lothrop Stoddard, in The Nation, Dec. 8, 1920.