According to our religious belief, the last best work of God is the human race. According to theobservation of biologists, the highest product of evolution is the human race. According to our ownnatural inner conviction, this twofold testimony is quite acceptable: we are the first class.Whatever our merits when compared with lower species, however, we vary conspicuously whencompared with one another. Humanity is superior to equinity, felinity, caninity; but there are degreesof humanness.Between existing nations there is marked difference in the qualities we call human; and historyshows us a long line of advance in these qualities in the same nation. The human race is still in themaking, is by no means done; and, however noble it is to be human, it will be nobler to be humaner.As conscious beings, able to modify our own acts, we have power to improve the species, topromote the development of the human race. This brings us to the children. Individuals mayimprove more or less at any time, though most largely and easily in youth; but race improvementmust be made in youth, to be transmitted. The real progress of man is born in him.If you were buying babies, investing in young human stock as you would in colts or calves, for thevalue of the beast, a sturdy English baby would be worth more than an equally vigorous youngFuegian. With the same training and care, you could develope higher faculties in the Englishspecimen than in the Fuegian specimen, because it was better bred. The savage baby would excel insome points, but the qualities of the modern baby are those dominant to-day. Education can domuch; but the body and brain the child is born with are all that you have to educate. The progress ofhumanity must be recorded in living flesh. Unless the child is a more advanced specimen than hisfather and mother, there is no racial improvement. Virtues we still strive for are not yet ours: it is theunconscious virtues we are born with that measure the rise of nations.Our mechanical products in all their rich variety serve two purposes, -to show the measure of thebrains that made them, and to help make better ones.The printing-press, for instance, marked a century of ability; but its main value is to developecenturies of greater ability. Society secretes, as it were, this mass of material wherewith to nourish itscountless young; and, as this material is so permanent and so mobile, it is proportionately moreadvantageous to our posterity than the careful preparation of some anxious insect for her swarm ofprogeny. Unless the creature is born better than his creators, they do not save him. He sinks back oris overcome by others, perhaps lingering decadent among the traces of lost arts, like degeneratenomad savages who wander among the ruins of ancestral temples. We see plenty of such cases, individually, showing this arrested social development, -from the eighteenth-century man, who isonly a little behind his age and does not hinder us much, to the dragging masses of dull peasantryand crude savagery, which keep us back so serious