a tribe,
shapes the destiny of a nation, and multiplies himself in the lives of
future millions. In accordance with this law, tenacity reappears in
every Scotchman; wit sparkles in every Irishman; vivacity is in every
Frenchman's blood; the Saxon is a colonizer and originates
institutions. During the construction of the Suez Canal it was
discovered that workmen with veins filled with Teutonic blood had a
commercial value two and a half times greater than the Egyptians.
Similarly, during the Indian war, the Highland troops endured double
the strain of the native forces. Napoleon shortened the stature of
the French people two inches by choosing all the taller of his
30,000,000 subjects and killing them in war. Waxing indignant, Horace
Mann thinks "the forehead of the Irish peasantry was lowered an inch
when the government made it an offense punishable with fine,
imprisonment, and a traitor's death to be the teacher of children." A
wicked government can make agony, epidemic, brutalize a race, and
reaching forward, fetter generations yet unborn. "Blood tells," says
science. But blood is the radical element put out at compound interest
and handed forward to generations yet unborn.

The second measure of a man's value to society is found in his
original endowment of physical strength. The child's birth-stock of
vital force is his capital to be traded upon. Other things being equal
his productive value is to be estimated mathematically upon the basis
of physique. Born weak and nerveless, he must go to society's
ambulance wagon, and so impede the onward march. Born vigorous and
rugged, he can help to clear the forest roadway or lead the advancing
columns. Fundamentally man is a muscular machine for producing the
ideas that shape conduct and character. All fine thinking stands with
one foot on fine brain fiber. Given large physical organs, lungs with
capacity sufficient to oxygenate the life-currents as they pass
upward; large arteries through which the blood may have full course,
run, and be glorified; a brain healthy and balanced with a compact
nervous system, and you have the basis for computing what will be a
man's value to society. Men differ, of course, in ways many--they
differ in the number and range of their affections, in the scope of
conscience, in taste and imagination, and in moral energy. But the
original point of variance is physical. Some have a small body and a
powerful mind, like a Corliss engine in a tiny bo