"Dick, boy, your position is distinctly Carlylean," Terrence McFane said in fatherly tones.
The sages of the madrono grove were at table, and, with Paula, Dick and Graham, made up the dinner party of seven.
"Mere naming of one's position does not settle it, Terrence," Dick replied. "I know my point is Carlylean, but that does not invalidate it. Hero-worship is a very good thing. I am talking, not as a mere scholastic, but as a practical breeder with whom the application of Mendelian methods is an every-day commonplace."
"And I am to conclude," Hancock broke in, "that a Hottentot is as good as a white man?"
"Now the South speaks, Aaron," Dick retorted with a smile. "Prejudice, not of birth, but of early environment, is too strong for all your philosophy to shake. It is as bad as Herbert Spencer's handicap of the early influence of the Manchester School."
"And Spencer is on a par with the Hottentot?" Dar Hyal challenged.
Dick shook his head.
"Let me say this, Hyal. I think I can make it clear. The average Hottentot, or the average Melanesian, is pretty close to being on a par with the average white man. The difference lies in that there are proportionately so many more Hottentots and negroes who are merely average, while there is such a heavy percentage of white men who are not average, who are above average. These are what I called the pace- makers that bring up the speed of their own race average-men. Note that they do not change the nature or develop the intelligence of the average-men. But they give them better equipment, better facilities, enable them to travel a faster collective pace.
"Give an Indian a modern rifle in place of his bow and arrows and he will become a vastly more efficient game-getter. The Indian hunter himself has not changed in the slightest. But his entire Indian race sported so few of the above-average men, that all of them, in ten thousand generations, were unable to equip him with a rifle."
"Go on, Dick, develop the idea," Terrence encouraged. "I begin to glimpse your drive, and you'll soon have Aaron on the run with his race prejudices and silly vanities of superiority."
"These above-average men," Dick continued, "these pace-makers, are the inventors, the discoverers, the constructionists, the sporting dominants. A race that sports few such dominants is classified as a lower race, as an inferior race. It still hunts with bows and arrows. It is not equipped. Now the average white man, per se, is just as bestial, just as stupid, just as inelastic, just as stagnative, just as retrogressive, as the average savage. But the average white man has a faster pace. The large number of sporting dominants in his society give him the equipment, the organization, and impose the law.