Chapter X: Race Betterment Through Heredity (1)

Most of us have heard in one form or another the fairy story of the youth on adventure bent, who was captured by the giant and under dire penalty in case of failure was set the task of sweeping out the giant's stable before sundown. The peculiarity of this stable, it will be recalled, was that, as fast as the refuse was swept out at the door an even greater quantity poured in through the windows so that the sweeper, just in proportion to his zeal, became more and more encumbered with his burden.

=A Questionable Form of Charity.--=Though we smile at the childishness of this legend, are we not as a civilized people attempting through our charities a feat parallel to that of this unfortunate youth? We foster and favor our social wastage with the inevitable result that it runs riot under our sheltering hand and deluges us with an ever accumulating flood of its like. For are we not constantly building more asylums, sanitaria and prisons, to preserve more unfit, to produce more defectives, to require still greater numbers of asylums, sanitaria and prisons, to preserve more unfit, and so on in unending progression?

At nearly every period of history there have been certain individuals who have seen the necessity of a state eliminating its supply of defectives.

=Past Protests.--=For instance, we find the importance of this strongly urged by Plato. After pointing out the fact that the shepherd, in order to maintain the standard of his flocks, bred only from the best individuals, as did likewise the huntsman with his dogs and horses, and the fancier with his various pets, Plato went on to show the danger to the state of allowing the constantly increasing body of defectives and degenerates to multiply their kind. Repeated expression of the same idea has occurred from time to time during the succeeding centuries.

Little heed was paid to these remonstrances, however, with the result that is known to us all. To-day, "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" is still sung by the poet, but the original nations themselves have long since passed into the night.

=An Increasing Flood of Defectives.--=Strive to ignore the unpleasant facts as we may, we have to admit that the same problem of what the human harvest shall be is with us in grave form to-day. The alarming phase of the situation, however, lies in the fact that we are facing an ever increasing flood of social wastage.

But _why_ this increase of defectives? It can not be attributed to oppression, to grinding poverty, or to decline in attention to our sick and needy, for never was prosperity greater, never were charities more flourishing, never such activity in the search for palliatives and cures. The simple fact is that we are breeding our defectives. The human harvest like the grain harvest is based fundamentally on heritage. And to get a better crop of human beings, we must, as with other crops, weed out bad strains.

To whatever source of information we turn the facts are essentially the same. Abroad we find that in England, for example, the ratio of defectives to normals more than doubled between 1764 and 1896. At home, from the investigation of Davenport and Weeks we learn that in the state of New Jersey the number of epileptics doubles every thirty years. And other investigators estimate that the fecundity of mental defectives in general is about twice as great as that of the average of our population. In a recent report of the New York State Board of Charities we read, "There are about thirty thousand feeble-minded persons in the state of New York, of whom four thousand are intermittently sequestered while twenty-six thousand who are a menace to society are at liberty and may produce the unfit." And a passage from the last Massachusetts report reads as follows: "We have been obliged to refuse a very large number of applicants for the admission of feeble-minded women--many of whom have given birth to one or more children. The prolific progeny of these women almost without exception are public charges from the date of their birth."

How fertile defective types may be is shown by a passage in one of Doctor Wilmarth's papers which runs as follows: "One feeble-minded woman, now removed from this state, had by different men eighteen children in nineteen years, she alleges." In a letter Doctor Wilmarth tells me that the birth of the twenty-third child of this woman has just been announced! In one English workhouse Potts reports sixteen feeble-minded women who have produced one hundred sixteen mentally defective children, and Branthwaite ninety-two female habitual drunkards who have had eight hundred fifty babies. If we include the two million individuals cared for annually in various institutional homes, hospitals and dispensaries as dependents, the estimated total of insane, feeble-minded, epileptic, deaf and dumb, criminals, juvenile delinquents, paupers and other dependents in the United States in 1910 was approximately three million, or one in every thirty of our population! With the higher fertility of certain of these classes and with only a small percentage under custodial care where will it all end? Is it not time for us to waken from our lethargy and stem this tide of national deterioration?

=Natural Elimination of Defectives Done Away With.--=With our improved methods of sanitation and care of the sick, the pauper and the defective, these classes have been freed from the stress of an environment that under natural conditions would have resulted in their premature death and consequent infertility. Or in the terminology of the biologist, we have done away with the factor of _natural selection_, the factor which in state of nature keeps all races purged of the unfit, the ill-adapted. With this restraining, and purifying influence removed, however, the weakling, the defective, may arrive at maturity and commingle his blood with that of the strong, with the inevitable result that the general vigor of the progeny from generation to generation is sapped and progressively undermined. Thus we are confronted by the stubborn fact that through present humanitarian methods we are driving the race toward decadence.

=Why Not Prevent Our Social Maladies?--=Now there is no reasonable person, I think, who will not admit that the motives underlying our modern altruistic practises are the noblest fruitage of our slow upward struggle from the brute to man. As humane beings, we can not cast aside these principles and return to the painful and pitiless method of nature which would leave the sick and the defective alone to perish miserably; the sacrifice would be too great.

Is there then no escape from this dilemma? To this query the modern student of heredity answers yes; let us but add more wisdom to our charity and the enigma is solved. We need no sacrifice of pity but rather an expansion of it. Let us but extend our vision from immediate suffering to the prospective suffering of the countless unborn descendants of our present unfit and ask ourselves the question, why should they be born? Why not prevent our social maladies instead of waiting to cure them? This is the province of eugenics.

=Eugenics Defined.--=The term Eugenics was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton in his book entitled _Inquiries Into Human Faculties_, and we may therefore look to him for a satisfactory definition. He says, "Eugenics is the study of the agencies under social control, that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally." And again, "I take Eugenics very seriously, feeling that its principles ought to become one of the dominant motives in a civilized nation, much as if they were one of its religious tenets.... Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings, but he also has the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace natural selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective. This is precisely the aim of Eugenics. Its first object is to check the birth-rate of the unfit instead of allowing them to come into being, though doomed in large numbers to perish prematurely. The second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the fit, by early marriages and the healthful rearing of their children."

=Improved Environment Alone Will Not Cure Racial Degeneracy.--=While many an enthusiastic humanitarian is laboring under the assumption that if we can improve external conditions human deficiencies will disappear, the student of heredity realizes that this is in large part a delusion unless we can secure an accompanying improvement in intrinsic qualities of the human species itself through the suitable mating of individuals. Just as the intelligent farmer to-day demands selected seed as well as good soil and proper cultivation, so one with the facts of heredity at hand would, as he views social problems, urge the fundamental importance of having selected stock with which to start. No shifts or shapings of environment will ever enable men to "gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles."

=Heredity and Environment.--=To wrangle over the question of which is the more important, heredity or environment, is about as idle a proceeding as to argue which is the more important, the stomach or something to put in the stomach. Man would soon come to grief without either. So, too, the question of human development is not one of heredity alone nor of environment alone; both are necessary and must work hand in hand. Dormant capacities must have proper environment to call them forth, but on the other hand no kind of environment can evoke responses if some degree of aptitude is not present.

Professor Thorndike undertook experiments with groups of school children of high and of low initial ability respectively to determine whether equal opportunity or equal special training would produce an equalizing effect in easily alterable traits such as rapidity in addition and the like. Without exception he found that at the end of such experiments, although both groups had improved, the superior individuals were farther ahead than ever, that equality of opportunity and training had widened rather than narrowed the gap between the two classes. Others who have made special studies on the causes of individual differences have come to the same conclusion; namely, that individuals differ widely by original nature and that similarity in conditions of nurture and training will not avail in deleting these differences.

Galton and others, from extensive studies based on English sources, have shown that notable achievements have run in certain families to a degree that is inexplicable on the basis of opportunity alone; it can be fully accounted for only by attributing much to superior inborn capacity. Doctor Woods has shown much the same thing for certain families in America. Schuster and Elderton have proved that there is a high degree of similarity in scholastic standing between fathers and sons in Oxford. Professor Pearson's measurements of mental characters in brothers and sisters while at school show a high degree of innate resemblance in many cases and certain cases of decided contrast. Where contrasts exist in certain families they remain unreduced in spite of the similarity of environment, thus proving that environment is less operative in the final intellectual establishment of such individuals than are their inborn aptitudes. Even in twins, as both Galton and Thorndike have shown, there is no tendency for similar education, home life and the like to render those originally different any more similar with advancing years.

Professor Karl Pearson has done more perhaps than any other individual toward attempting actually to measure the relative strength of heredity and environment. Numerous statistical measurements lead him to conclude that it is a conservative estimate to regard heredity as at least five or ten times as important as environment in the development of the individual. A vigorous defense by him of this position will be found in _Biometrika_ for April, 1914.

=Inter-Racial Marriage.--=Some of the dangers of racial deterioration which threaten us because of our laxity regarding immigration have already been indicated. It is high time that we give this whole question the most serious consideration of which we are capable. From the rate at which immigrants are increasing it is obvious that our very life-blood is at stake. For our own protection we must face the question of what types or races should be ruled out. Aside from the dangers which lie in the defective or unsuccessful types already discussed in Chapter IX, many students of heredity feel that there is great hazard in the mongrelizing of distinctly unrelated races no matter how superior the original strains may be. Unfortunately there is a great lack of reliable data on this point. The mulatto of our own country, the Eurasians in India and the mixed races of South America are, according to the testimony of many observers, eloquent arguments against such hybridization. Agassiz remarked on this point as follows:

"Let any one who doubts the evil of the mixture of races and who is
inclined from mistaken philanthropy to break down all barriers between
them come to Brazil. He can not deny the deterioration consequent upon
the amalgamation of races, more wide-spread here than in any other
country in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities
of the white man, the Indian, and the negro, leaving a mongrel
nondescript type deficient in physical and mental energy."

Of the American mulatto one not infrequently meets with the assertion that he is on the average inferior mentally, morally and physically to either the white or the negro race. Thus Doctor J. B. Taylor[17] states that, "It is demonstrated by well-attested facts that these hybrids of black and white are vastly more susceptible to certain infections; their moral as well as physical stamina is lower than that of either original race." Others would deny that conclusive evidence to this effect exists. However, it is certain that under existing social conditions in our own country only the most worthless and vicious of the white race will tend in any considerable numbers to mate with the negro and the result can not but mean deterioration on the whole for either race.

There is certainly not one iota of evidence that the crossing of any two widely different human races will yield superior offspring in any respect and there are many indications that such intermixture lowers the average of the population. Our evidence derived from plant and animal breeding is also against pronounced crosses. The inferiority of the mongrel is universally recognized. No sane farmer, for example, would seek to improve his Jerseys or his Herefords by crossing one with the other. It is true that in pure breeds of plants and animals we sometimes venture on a cross to introduce some new desirable character but we follow up such mixture by a rigid selection in which is eliminated all but the rare individuals having the desired characteristics, and we continue this elimination generation after generation to fix our characters again. It is obvious that no such selection as this would be possible among the progeny of human crosses.

It clearly becomes our duty then to determine as accurately as possible the degree of non-relationship between races it is inadvisable to transcend in inter-racial marriages. We are certainly taking great risks in accepting in any considerable numbers those races we can not assimilate to advantage into our own stock.

=War.--=The deteriorating effect of war on national physique and vigor has been so frequently cited by eugenists[18] and is so obvious as scarcely to require further comment. It should be pointed out, however, that where, as is the case at present in Great Britain, armies are assembled from volunteers, instead of by conscription, there is the greatest danger from the eugenic standpoint, since not only physical but moral qualities are involved. For it is the brave, the generous, the individual with a high sense of duty who goes forward to the slaughter leaving the cowardly, the selfish or the indifferent to father the race. With the awful deadliness of modern warfare upon exhibition before our very eyes to-day, the extreme seriousness of such selective action must be evident to every thoughtful person.

=Human Conservation.--=We talk much in recent years of _conservation_; but what are our forests and frontiers, our minerals and our waterways, compared with our national health and life-blood? No farmer would think of setting aside a diseased or physically defective _animal_ for breeding purposes, yet the same man together with the majority of mankind is wholly oblivious to similar faults when it comes to the mating of human beings. But is it not as important to look to fitness in man as in Poland China hogs or Holstein cows? Certainly the various strains are as marked and breed as true in the human family as in our live stock. Why face complacently in our own families what we would not tolerate in our piggery?

From the expenditure of comparatively small sums in studying the inheritance of various qualities in wheat, corn and other grain, improvements based on the laws of genetics have been secured which are enormously increasing our agricultural output and thereby adding to our national wealth. But if it costs relatively little to discover and conserve millions of dollars' worth of hereditary qualities in our plants and animals, what are we to think of ourselves, an intelligent people who, knowing that "every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit," still go on placidly permitting the production of defectives and delinquents? Can we continue to drink the sluggish blood of the pauper and the imbecile into our veins and hope to escape unscathed?

We are all familiar with the fate of Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Egypt and Rome. Why not America? Certainly we have no pledge of special immunity from Divine Powers. If so, what then is the meaning of our 366 hospitals for insane which cost us annually $21,000,000; our 63 institutions for feeble-minded costing us over $5,000,000; our 1,300 prisons maintained at a cost of more than $13,000,000; our 1,500 hospitals whose annual maintenance requires at least $30,000,000; our 115 schools or homes for deaf and dumb; our 2,500 almshouses with an annual expense account of $20,000,000 and our 1,200 refuge homes costing annually several millions of dollars more? To say that we spend annually over $100,000,000 on the custody of insane, feeble-minded, paupers, epileptics, deaf, blind and other charges is expressing the situation very conservatively.

=Kindness in the Long Run.--=There is no one I think who will not admit that the sympathy and charity of the human heart are its noblest virtues. But we must face the problem of what is kindness in the long run. Havelock Ellis well says, "The superficially sympathetic man flings a coin to the beggar; the more deeply sympathetic man builds an almshouse for him so that he need no longer beg; but perhaps the most radically sympathetic of all is the man who arranges that the beggar shall not be born."

What shall we do?

=The Problem Has Two Phases.--=For an intelligent consideration of the problem one must recognize at the outset that it has two distinct phases; namely, (1) a selective union of the fittest, or in other words, a conscious attempt to breed a superior race; and (2) the elimination of the obviously unfit by preventing their reproduction, with the purpose of purifying the present race. It is evident at a glance that these are two essentially distinct problems although the practise of either method could result in racial improvement. The first is sometimes spoken of as _positive_ or _constructive eugenics_, the second as _negative_ or _restrictive eugenics_.

=Constructive Eugenics Must Be Based on Education.--=As to the first phase, direct selection for superiority, the campaign must, in the very nature of things, be one of education. With the necessary knowledge of the facts in mind, the awakening conscience of the individual together with an enlightened public opinion will form the safest guide. Increasing popular comprehension of the inevitable nature of human inheritance must engender a sense of responsibility as to the positive eugenic fitness of a contemplated marriage. The growth of this sentiment will doubtless be slow, and properly so, for as yet we have but half-lights on what are the most desirable types of humanity. No one can say what the highest type of man should be, but almost any one can readily pick out types which certainly should _not_ be.

=Inferior Increasing More Rapidly Than Superior Stocks.--=Modern eugenists, although realizing that the constructive phase is of great importance, are making no attempt to map out any fixed mode of procedure for it beyond pointing out the desirability of larger families among the better classes. The need for individuals of superior physical, mental and moral qualities to multiply is so obvious as scarcely to require comment. Yet the fact is that judging from all appearances these are the very ones who have the lowest birth-rate. Eugenics is mainly concerned with the relative rates of increase of the various classes, not with mere fertility in itself. And the actual increase must be measured in terms of the extent to which birth-rate exceeds death-rate. If a high birth-rate is accompanied by a high death-rate then it is not especially significant in increasing a given class as a whole. All available evidence points to the fact that to-day the lower strata of society are far outbreeding the middle and higher, with an almost negligible difference in death-rate, and just in the measure that these lower strata are innately inferior just in that degree must the race deteriorate. The seriousness of the whole situation as it exists to-day hinges, therefore, on the extent to which the lower strata are inferior to those above them.

=An Unselected Population May Contain Much Valuable Material.--=In evaluating these lower strata a matter of very great importance is whether the population is a selected or an unselected one. If the population has been long resident in a given region and has had fairly good opportunity for education then we will find in the lower reaches a larger percentage of sedimentation made up of the worthless and inferior stocks. If, however, a continual fomentation and geographical shifting of the population is in progress as in parts of America, or if adequate educational opportunities are lacking, as in some parts of Russia, the poor and less well-to-do classes may contain, no one can tell how much, relatively valuable stock.

Forel remarks on this point as follows:

"If we compare the nature of delinquents, abandoned children,
vagabonds, etc., in a country where little or nothing has been done
for the people (Russia, Galicia, Vienna, etc.), with that of the same
individuals in Switzerland, for example, where much has already been
done for the poor, we find this result: In Switzerland, these
individuals are nearly all tainted with alcoholism, or pathological
heredity; they consist of alcoholics, incorrigibles, and congenital
decadents, and education can do little for them because nearly all
those who have a better hereditary foundation have been able to earn
their living by honest work. In Russia, Galicia, and even in Vienna,
we are, on the contrary, astonished to see how many honest natures
there are among the disinherited when they are provided with work and
education."

=The Lack of Criteria for Judging Fitness.--=Barring the untold hordes of actual defectives who have gravitated into this lower stratum, there are few positive criteria by which we can measure the real fitness of the remainder. Before we can set out on a campaign of positive eugenics we must have some standard by which to steer, and it would be a rash advocate indeed who would assert that class distinction alone, or even success as measured by public opinion to-day should be our whole criterion of fitness. Shall we measure fitness in terms of how successfully one can acquire worldly goods, or in other words, by the property test, or what shall be our standard?

=The College Graduate.--=Many of our modern critiques of the birth-rate situation make much of the fact that our college graduates as a group are scarcely reproducing themselves. According to Davenport, Bryn Mawr College between 1888 and 1913 has graduated 1,193 bachelors of arts, but these women have produced up to January, 1913, only 263 girls to take their place in the next generation. He also points out that statistics on some of the graduate classes of Harvard of twenty years ago or earlier show that they are little more than maintaining themselves; thus one class of 328 graduates twenty years later had produced 195 sons, and in another case a class of 278 individuals had produced, twenty-five years later, 141 sons. Relatively similar statistics can be cited for other eastern colleges.

All such cases of college graduates cited as especially deplorable declines in birth-rate are based on the assumption that these individuals are a particularly superior stock.[19] But one might question this premise as a generalization. It may or may not be true. Are they superior or have they had mainly a combination of luck and incentive, luck in that their parents had sufficient means, acquired possibly through their own superiority, possibly not, to send them to college, and incentive derived from a fortunate environment which awakened a desire in them--or in their parents for them--for college education? Is the woolly-witted son of opulence, so abundant in our colleges to-day, who is boosted through by hook or by crook, of superior eugenical value to the alert eager boy--and his name is legion--destined for economic reasons to go to work at or before the completion of his high-school course, perhaps because of the very fact of an unlimited fecundity in his own family which necessitates his help for the general support?

When one first learns of the declining birth-rate among college women and men he feels appalled, but immediately the question flashes up, if this is _the_ superior stock, and up to date it has died out or is dying out rapidly, whence then this ever augmenting rush of young folk who fairly deluge our universities and colleges to-day? Does it not rather point to the fact that in our own country at least, the man who will and can take a college education successfully is not so much the product of breeding from college men, but of a prosperity which leaves a sufficient surplus in the family exchequer to enable sons and daughters to go to college, and is it not reasonable to suppose that there is yet an abundant stock back of these who similarly await but the golden touch of opportunity? When we consider such men as Carlyle, Lincoln and a host of others who were not the sons of collegians, although we may be university pedigreed ourselves we can not but feel doubtful of the validity of a premise which takes a college stock unqualifiedly as having any considerable monopoly of innate superiority. After all, college can mean little more than opportunity, and the obtaining of such opportunity in this world of economic maladjustments and accidents of social position is too largely a matter of chance, at least in America, to stamp the possessors of these advantages, on this criterion alone, as of inborn superiority. Undoubtedly much that is intrinsically good now slumbers in the lower strata of society because of lack of favorable environment to call forth the latent possibilities.

=Native Ability, Independence and Energy Eugenically Desirable.--=Although we can not sift out with certainty the superior from the inferior in our normal population by the property test or the educational standard alone, it is undoubtedly true that, on the whole, native ability, independence and energy are present to a higher degree in our well-to-do and prosperous families than in the stocks which merely hold their own or which gradually decline, and there is no gainsaying the fact that in so far as the lower classes are where they are through actual deficiency--and there are enormous numbers in this category--they threaten our very existence as a race. It is imperative that the great middle class in particular establish in some way a selective birth-rate, by increased fertility on their own part, and diminished fecundity on the part of inferior stocks, which will offset or more than offset the disproportionate increase of the socially unfit.

=Four Children to Each Marriage Required to Maintain a Stock.--=It is estimated that under present conditions an average of at least four children should be born to each marriage if a stock is to maintain its numbers undiminished. Some of our most valuable strains are falling far short of this average. In a statistical table on the relative fertility of different stocks, prepared by Pearson, we find the mentally defective, criminal, deaf-mute and degenerate stocks heading the list with averages ranging from five to seven children per family, while the American graduate (based on Harvard statistics) and the English intellectual types average less than two children per marriage. While the death-rate is higher in the undesirable classes mentioned, it is by no means enough higher to compensate for the difference in birth-rates. Thus while certain very desirable types are not maintaining themselves genetically, other extremely undesirable ones are rapidly more than replacing themselves. Investigations made by Heron in London show that this condition as regards English desirables did not exist sixty years ago; then the richer a community was in professional men and well-to-do families, the higher was the birth-rate.

=Factors Contributing to Low Birth-Rate in Desirable Strains.--=Most students of the subject believe that the fecundity of much of the best blood in our country has reached such a low ebb as to threaten the whole fabric of our commonwealth. How to correct this is the pressing problem to which no one has found a solution. However much one may deplore it the fact remains that always in the history of the civilized world with the rise of material conditions in any class of a population there has come an accompanying limitation of child-birth. Explain this as we may in modern times--whether as an awakened individualism which looks only to the immediate interest of the individual as against the ultimate interest of the race, or a desire for luxuries or for a better opportunity for smaller numbers of children, or as a determined effort of the wage earner to better his conditions, or to the feminist movement with its accompaniment of a greater personal freedom of married women and the recognition of the fact that marriage and child-bearing are often bars to employment, or to general increasing pressure of economic burdens--in brief whatever the cause or causes, there is no denying the fact of a diminishing birth-rate among our abler men and women. Moreover, no amount of coaxing, cajoling or dire prophecy seems to avail in altering the conditions. Various partial remedies, many of them of questionable practicability, have been proposed, but so far there has been no far-reaching effort made to put any of them into effect. It has been suggested that society return to the simple life so that our young folk may marry earlier and live more easily on limited means, but so far few volunteers have appeared to lead the procession. While there is no doubt that present economic conditions tend to penalize parenthood, the simple life will not return for the mere asking. It has been pointed out that the father is in unfair competition with the bachelor and is also unfairly taxed in comparison, and some would therefore tax unmarried men more heavily. Others would pay a direct bounty on reproduction, but it is probable that such rewards would merely stimulate families of the lower types to increased fruitfulness. And so one panacea after another may be weighed and found wanting.

=The Educated Public Must Be Made to Realize the Situation.--=It seems probable that the most success will be met with through the slow and unspectacular methods of education. The necessity of the situation must be driven home so that it becomes part and parcel of the collective intelligence of the educated public. Different ideals of life will have to be established in the young. If knowledge of the facts of heredity is thoroughly disseminated among the people and ideals regarding parenthood are fostered, then much will have been accomplished by the psychic power of suggestion alone toward the end desired.

=Utilization of Family Pride as a Basis for Constructive Eugenics.--=There are few more powerful incentives to make the best of one's abilities, or few greater deterrents from vice than family pride; and there is no reason why this same sentiment may not be aroused in behalf of unborn generations. The sentiment of caste or aristocracy in some form is well nigh universal in mankind. The family of Mr. A came over in the Mayflower and is therefore worlds above the family of Mr. B, who arrived fifty years later. Mr. X's income is $5,000 a year, Mr. Y's only $1,500. The poor family in the front suite of the tenement regards itself as far superior to the one in the rear. Among criminals the professional house-breaker feels himself to be of higher caste than the sneak-thief, and in turn is surpassed by the bank-burglar. Even in the insane asylum the feeling is rampant. With such a wide-spread tendency for a foundation the creation of a sentiment of eugenic aristocracy is by no means a visionary undertaking.

=The Tendency for Like to Marry Like.--=Even now there is a decided though unconscious tendency for like to marry like and thus create particular strains. We have lines, for instance, which produce notably families of scholars, others which yield mainly statesmen, and still other strains of inventors, of financiers, of naval men, of soldiers, and of actors respectively. And there is little doubt that people, with the facts of inheritance of ability once before them, will be led to act more or less in accordance with their knowledge. On the other hand, due apparently to the same unconscious tendency for like to marry like, we find produced criminalistic, feeble-minded, deaf-mute and tubercular stocks. The first type of family is often termed _aristogenic_ and the second or defective type, _cacogenic_.

=Public Opinion as an Incentive to Action.--=Much of our social conduct is the result of the pressure of public opinion, yet so accustomed are we to this that we ordinarily do not feel it as a hardship. There is little doubt that similarly the more wholesome attitude toward parenthood advocated by the eugenist would be taken as a matter of course, once the idea became prevalent. It would come to be one of those socially preconceived ideas which are as much actualities and which become unconscious guides to action no less certainly than do the more obvious personal habits of the individual. And just in the degree that we as a race get the "feeling" that intellect, morals and skill are highly desirable attributes in marriage selection, just in that degree will one's affections in their earlier stages gravitate toward individuals who possess such qualities in high degree. In the main, those stocks which have shown by ancestral as well as personal achievement their superiority will tend to insure most certainly a continuation of this superiority in offspring.

=Choosing a Marriage Mate Means Choosing a Parent.--=Although marriages, as all young folks know, are made in Heaven, it is interesting to see what a vast number of these foreordained matches coincide with propinquity in college, in church, or in the same social set. Moreover, children are born here on earth. The one thing of all things that the eugenist desires is for these young folk to get a clear-eyed vision of the fact that in choosing a marriage mate they are also choosing the future father or mother of their children with all that this implies.

=The Best Eugenic Marriage Also a Love Match.--=A few recent writers, who show an utter misconception of what the aim of modern eugenics is, have raised the cry of give us the old-fashioned love match instead of the eugenic marriage, as if the eugenist's ideal of moral cleanliness, freedom from transmissible physical taints or mental enfeeblement, and an attitude of special approval toward marriages which bring together individuals of more than average mental or spiritual endowment, had anything in it that was inimical to love. No one better than he realizes the sordid depths to which marital relations devoid of mutual affection and regard must reach. Certainly there is nothing in the eugenic ideal when its full import is understood that can shock the sensibilities of the most delicate-minded. Indeed it is people of fine susceptibilities who will be the first to feel repugnance toward a marriage which means mental or physical deterioration of their own blood.

=Good Traits No Less Than Bad Ones Inherited.--=An inspection of such charts as those shown in Figs. 37, 38 and 39, pp. 313, 314, 316--and an abundance of such encouraging records may now be found--reassures us in our convictions that good traits are no less inheritable than bad ones. And what any healthy, mentally well-endowed person may be depriving the world of if he or she declines to enter into a fruitful marriage can not be better exemplified than in the following excerpt from Davenport:

"Many a man at the opening of his life work vows, as Judge John Lowell
of the middle of the eighteenth century did, as he was being graduated
from Harvard College, that he will never marry. But nature was too
strong for John Lowell and he married three times, and among his
descendants was the director of a great astronomical observatory, the
president of Harvard College, a principal founder and promoter of the
Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston Atheneum; the founder of
the city of Lowell and its cotton mills; the founder of the Lowell
Institute at Boston; the beloved General Charles Russell Lowell and
his brother, James, both of whom fell in the Civil War, and James
Russell Lowell, poet, professor and ambassador; besides brilliant
lawyers and men entrusted with large interests as executors of
estates. Do you think John Lowell would have taken that vow could he
have foreseen the future?"

Pedigree of family with artistic (dark upper section), literary (dark right section) and musical (dark left section) ability (from Davenport).]

=The Elimination of the Grossly Unfit Urgent.--=But even if, under present conditions of partial knowledge and lack of an adequate standard, the constructive phase of eugenics must be left in the main to the awakening conscience of the individual as humanity improves in general enlightenment, the second phase, the elimination of the grossly unfit is one of the greatest social obligations that confronts us to-day. For if there is an alarming amount of mental impairment in civilized nations, and if the problems of pauperism, inebriety, prostitution and criminality are closely interwoven with the problems of mental unsoundness, as we have every reason to believe from available data, then any means which will operate toward securing normally functioning brains will at the same time operate toward diminishing, defects and delinquencies. And inasmuch as a considerable proportion of defects, both mental and physical, are inheritable, it is obvious that if we can diminish the number of children born into the world with defective brains or bodies we have made a long stride in the right direction.

Inheritance of ability (from Kellicott after Whetham).]

=Suggested Remedies.--=But how go about it? Various schemes have been proposed, of which the chief are as follows:

1. Laws restricting marriage.

2. Systems of mating with the purpose of covering up and gradually
diluting out defective traits.

3. Segregation during the reproductive period.

4. Sterilization.

5. Education in the principles of eugenics.

=Inefficacy of Laws Which Forbid Marriage of Mental Defectives.--=The utter inefficacy of the first proposition, namely the enactment of laws restricting marriage, at least as regards the socially unfit whose condition is based on impaired mentality, has been demonstrated time and again. If they are forbidden marriage, they merely have children without getting married. Most states have laws to prevent the marriage of such individuals but these laws are almost wholly ineffective in preventing procreation on their part. We might as well recognize once for all that in such cases nothing short of close custodial care or sterilization will accomplish the end desired.

As to the second proposition, systems of mating with the purpose of covering up and gradually diluting out defective traits, this has been shown to be possible with certain types of defectives. Whether it is desirable or not is a different question.

Inheritance of ability (chart condensed and incomplete) in three markedly able families (from Kellicott after Whetham):

1, Charles Darwin; 2, his cousin, Francis Galton, founder of the modern eugenic movement.]

=Systems of Mating Impracticable in the Main.--=By systems of mating, it should be said, is not meant the arbitrary marrying of two individuals willy-nilly, but rather it is the prevention from marriage of two individuals having similar defects. In general the facts at our command indicate that in the majority of cases the offspring from a marriage of an insane, feeble-minded or epileptic person with a normal individual free from all neuropathic taints are normal or at most show but slight effects of the taint. But what normal individual would knowingly marry into such a stock? With few exceptions such traits where inheritable are apparently negative, that is, not represented by some positive abnormal factor but due to the lack of some element or elements necessary to the proper working of the normal brain. In the offspring of such a union the necessary missing factors are supplied by the normal parent. Or in Mendelian phraseology, the defective traits are recessive and are dominated by the normality of the other parent. Such offspring, however, while apparently normal of body are not normal of germ-plasm, inasmuch as half of their germ-cells will carry the abnormality of the defective parent as earlier explained (page 119) under Mendelism. We have already seen (page 119) how by continually marrying into strong strains the liability to recessive defect can be diluted out until the descendants are no more likely to have defective children than are members of our ordinary population. If, however, as is estimated in Bulletin No. 5 of the _Eugenics Record Office_, about thirty per cent. of our general population already carry recessive neuropathic taints, it certainly is a hazardous proceeding to attempt thus to breed out nervous defects unless one is absolutely sure of the normality of the strain into which it is proposed to marry. The great difficulty is in determining whether or not there is a defective ancestry in a given stock. We have at present no criteria for identifying normal individuals who have defective germ-plasm. As a practical test, however, if no defect has appeared in the stock for three or four generations back, the marriage would be relatively as safe as are the marriages of our average population to-day.

=Corrective Mating Presupposes Knowledge of Eugenics.--=But such a scheme of corrective mating presupposes a relatively high degree of intelligence and judgment on the part of the participants, and this is just what we do not have and in the nature of things can not get, in the types of feeble-minded, epileptic and degenerate strains we are striving to eliminate. All our evidence shows that when unrestricted there is a marked tendency for feeble-minded to mate with feeble-minded, degenerate with degenerate. About sixteen per cent. of the feeble-minded, in fact, come from consanguineous marriages. If we try to legislate them into specific types of marriage then we encounter the same futility pointed out under our discussion of restrictive legislation, they will produce offspring without the formality of marriage.

In certain cases of insanity and in other than neuropathic defects one can see how the system might be inaugurated with greater prospects of success, but even then a knowledge of the principles of eugenics would be necessary to the participants, or in other words we could only accomplish our end through our fifth proposition, education.

=Segregation Has Many Advocates.--=As to the third proposition, segregation during the reproductive period, this seems to have a larger number of advocates than any other coercive measure. While on theoretical grounds it is plausible enough, when we face the actual putting of the method into practise we are confronted by the fact that tremendous sums of money would be required to sequestrate and maintain colonies or industrial refuges.

When one realizes that no state now provides for more than a small minority of its defectives, and knowing also of the pressure that must be brought to bear on legislatures to secure sufficient funds to provide for these cases of extremest urgency, one can not be overly optimistic about the practicability of extensive sequestration.

E. R. Johnstone, the superintendent of a large training school for feeble-minded in New Jersey, points out that no state in the Union is providing for many more than one-tenth of her feeble-minded and epileptics. If his estimate is true, to place in institutions, treat and train all its feeble-minded and epileptics would even now almost swamp any state treasury. But what _will_ it be in the future if we permit this unrestricted nine-tenths to go on and multiply their kind?

Leaving out of account the enormous sums spent in private charities even now from one-fifth to one-seventh the total public expenditures of almost any one of our states is going to maintain its defectives, dependents and criminals. From the 1912 report of the secretary of state, in the state of Wisconsin, for instance, I learn that of the total expenses for 1912, sixteen per cent. was for charitable and penal institutions. The situation is even worse in some other states. Think of it! Think what a large total of expense it becomes! And the expense is far secondary from the humanitarian standpoint to the misery involved.

In the _Survey_ of May 24, 1913, we find Mr. Hastings H. Hart, Director of the Department of Child Helping of the Russell Sage Foundation, proposing very specifically "a working program for the extinction of the defective delinquent," which involves segregation during the reproductive period. He gives the number of feeble-minded under public care as 20,000 in institutions for the feeble-minded, 16,000 in almshouses, 5,000 in hospitals for the insane, and 26,000 in prisons and reformatories, or a total of 67,000 already under custodial care. And he asserts that as nearly as can be judged, this is one-third of the feeble-minded persons in the United States.

Between this estimate that one-third of our feeble-minded are in institutions and Doctor Johnstone's that we are not providing for many more than one-tenth of our feeble-minded and epileptic, there is a wide discrepancy, but I know of no accurate data[20] whereby the matter can be settled definitely. One point of difference may be that Doctor Johnstone specifically includes epileptics and another may be one of definition of feeble-minded. However, supposing that we could get them all into institutions, institutional care at present by no means also implies prevention of propagation. It is not an unusual history of feeble-minded women in our county poor-houses that they alternate between periods of housework in some family and periods of residence in the almshouse, the return to the latter being only too often to bear an additional child.

Not a few students of the problem, however, advocate a rigid segregation as the only reasonable preventive measure, no matter what the expense. They point out that the cost is mounting up higher each year and that we are only increasing it ultimately by procrastination. They urge, moreover, that when counting the cost of the segregation of the feeble-minded we should bear in mind also that we are reducing the expenses of our other charity and penal institutions, since much of degeneracy, pauperism and petty criminality centers in mental enfeeblement. Some believe that colonies can be established which are in considerable measure self-supporting. Doctor Johnstone, for instance, although his estimates of the number of feeble-minded and epileptic is one of the highest, sketches out in a recent paper (in _Pediatrics_, August, 1912) a plan which he considers feasible.

But what assurance have we that we can prevent the production of defectives by segregation? In reply may be cited a recent experiment on an extensive scale. Cretinism is a condition due to disease of the thyroid glands. It is characterized by goiter, marked deformities and imbecility. It is hereditary and has been very prevalent in certain valleys of southern Switzerland and northern Italy. Cretin mated with cretin and consequently a large new supply was constantly produced. In recent years in certain communities the sexes have been segregated (see _Eugenic Review_, 1910, Jordan) with the result that in such places cretinism has about disappeared.

Coming now to the fourth solution proposed, namely, sterilization,[21] let us consider some of its alleged advantages and disadvantages.

=Sterilization.--=First of all, since there is some considerable popular misunderstanding on the subject, it should be made plain that by sterilization is not necessarily, nor in fact generally, meant asexualization, or the removal of the reproductive glands. On the contrary, in the male, sterilization is ordinarily accomplished by an operation known as _vasectomy_, in which a small piece of each sperm duct is removed. Such reports on it as I have found indicate that it is a comparatively simple minor operation which involves no special inconvenience or hardship on the subject beyond the deprivation of offspring. In fact, according to Doctor Sharp's report, in the majority of cases where it has been put into practise the patient has usually submitted voluntarily after having the details of the situation explained to him and has often advised fellow delinquents to do likewise.

Even should later developments show that a mistake had been made, in all probability the matter could be remedied by a second operation in which the cut ends of the ducts can be reunited. This has been accomplished experimentally in dogs, and furthermore, in men rendered sterile by occlusion of the duct through inflammatory diseases, the sterility has been remedied by removing the blocked area and reuniting the ends of the duct on either side.

In women the corresponding operation--a section of the oviduct--is termed _salpingectomy_. Here, however, the operation is a more serious one as it usually involves opening the abdominal cavity and the accompanying hazard of infection, a danger sufficiently great that it is safe to say that the operation will be resorted to more rarely than vasectomy in man.

=As a Eugenic Measure.--=Sterilization as a eugenic measure has many advocates and perhaps more opponents; and among the latter, it must be said, are many competent and thoughtful students of the subject who recognize existing conditions and deplore their continuance as much as any one. They maintain that while we may have to come to it as a last resort, we are yet too ignorant of the actual effects of the operation, or are too little informed on the inheritability of the specific traits we are trying to eradicate, to launch forth on so radical a program. We must not forget that when we put sterilization into effect we are going to have to deal with individual cases, not general averages.

=To What Conditions Applicable.--=And just here, it seems to me, is the crux of the situation. When confronted by the defective individual, in a practical case, just what criteria are we going to use to determine whether this particular individual should be sterilized or not? Nearly all of the twelve states which have sterilization laws specify insanity, feeble-mindedness, epilepsy and criminality.

=In Insanity.--=When it comes to insanity I strongly suspect that those who have the selection of the examining board will have difficulty in finding an alienist who is willing to take the responsibility of deciding on just which insane individuals shall be operated on and which not. For among the insane there are so many kinds and degrees of mental unsoundness, and these are of such varying and as yet unknown eugenical significance, that a positive decision is frequently out of the question. Of the twenty-seven or more recognized forms of insanity who knows with any considerable degree of certainty which are heritable, which not? Shall we treat all manic-depressives alike? Shall we treat them as, for instance, we would those suffering from dementia precox? Who will take the responsibility of answering positively? Again, what shall we do in cases of paresis, or general paralysis of the insane, an affliction which probably invariably has syphilis as its antecedent? Yet it constitutes one of the commonest forms of insanity found in asylums. Doctor George H. Kirby, director of Clinical Psychiatry, Manhattan State Hospital, says that with one exception there are more admissions of paretics to Manhattan State Hospital than sufferers from any other form of mental disorder. He continues, "We find that when either the father or the mother suffers from paresis that many other members of the family may be infected with syphilis, and furthermore, we find that a surprisingly large number of children in these families are feeble-minded, nervous, or in other ways abnormal." But here, it is clear, the patient has done the damage before he reached the hospital, nor was it paresis as such that did the harm but the syphilitic infection of which paresis itself was but the outcome.

Certainly the one fact which stands out conspicuously when we face most concrete cases, is that at present we need more urgently than sterilization laws for the insane, exhaustive studies of the inheritability of specific mental infirmities that we may know with some degree of certainty which warrant sterilization.