BACK TO THE JUNGLE!

A bill prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the schools was signed by the Governor of Tennessee and became a law less than two months ago. His Excellency, in defending his action, caustically declared at that time that nobody believed it was going to be an active statute. Governor Peay, however, had his tongue in his cheek all the while it now appears. Professor J. T. Scopes, a scientist, is one of the first to realize that the soft spoken Fundamentalists were not so playful as they pretended, for before he knew it he found himself arrested to face a charge of violating a state law.

The drive against evolution is not confined to the backwoods of Tennessee, but is nation-wide. Oklahoma passed a law against teaching evolution in the schools, many states will hire no teachers who believe in evolution, while not a few states require by law that the King James Bible with its account of the creation in the Book of Genesis shall be read an taught. Similarly appalling is the list of states where anti-evolutionist laws like that of Tennessee are pending. Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, West Virginia, Arkansas, California, lowa, Illiginia, North Dakota, Minnesota, Oregon, and Arizona.

Is America going to renounce its cardinal principle of freedom of thought and religious belief? The hard-won victories of the early days will be meaningless and in vain, if the rabid Fundamentalists succeed in foisting the chaos of medievalist upon the land. The great advance of civilization in the last fifty years has been due in overwhelming measure to two things which this cataclysm would utterly destroy--intellectual freedom and the advance of science.

A constitutional democracy is often held up as the highest form of government. In a democracy, however, the vote of the majority, that is, the uneducated masses, determines as a rule the legal statutes of the country. The present grave situation is a sad commentary on the success of a democratic government which prides itself on its inviolate constitution, its personal liberty, and last but not least on its intellectual enlightenment.