Peking, Aug. 27.
The schoolmasters in Peking who have announced that their relation to the Russian Bolshevists is that of the pupil to the teacher are of none of the ruling communist types. They would not survive a great social revolution in China, therefore. They never have in history, least of all in Russia. The intellectual, the first to detect evil in established governments, the first to study strange "isms" as alternatives to evil systems of government, always open the bottle and let the genie go free and are always rewarded by being the firist devoured.
Whatever fallacies we may think there are in the communist theory of government by the industrial proletariat, or in the subordinate theories of the normal relations between the individual and the State, they are superficial. The great errors have been made in their appraisement of the nature of man and of what we call human nature. Upon these their whole philosophy is founded and, if they are wrong in these, they are wrong throughout. Their great premise, which was established for them by Rous-eau and the Liberals of his time, is that all men are born equal. This they interpret literally. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote it in the declaration of America's independence, would probably have interpreted it literally and the science of the time would probably have upheld him in such an interpretation. Modern science will not uphold the communist in this generation in aq literal interpreta tion of the phrase.
The biologist, the psychologist, the physician and the anthropologist will all deny vigorously now that any two men are into this world with precisely the same mental capacities or the same moral tendencies, and they will also deny that environment—short of disease, or mutilation through accident—can seriously impair or alter the mental capacity with which a man is born. As opposed to this scientific conclusion, the Communist still clings to the old theory that anything may be made of any man by environment. To carry this to an absurd conclusion, a uriist would have to lieve, to make his faith logical from|defy nature and bring all men to beginning to end, that you could take a pigmy from Central Africa and, by putting him in an environment which duplicated Lord Kelvin's environment from birth to maturity, you could make another Lord Kelvin of him. The wolf and the dog are closely related and by raising a wolf with a dog he will learn to bark, but in the end he is a wolf still, with instincts which a dog has lost, while the dog has a capacity for learning things which a wolf cannot learn. Modern science recog-sizes that men are born with in-hented capacities and eraments differing nearly as widely, if not quite, as those of the dog and the wolf; the consistent Communist cannot recognize the findings of science in this field at all. He must either dispute or ignore these findings.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.