Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/575

Rh  of science all over the world echoes again and again the words of Gal ton, that the way to better a race lies "in preventing the more faulty members from breeding."

The proper method has been, used often enough, but crudely, by such rulers as Ezzelino da Romano, Henry I, and many others.

We need this reform more than any other that has been proposed in our present time. We should look forward to it as we do to the noblest and best aspirations which crown our lives with light, yea, as we look with uplifted eyes for the hope of our best salvation in this world. The earth is reeking with the sweat of evil, injustice, and moral sickness; the means for relief are easily within our reach; they will bring injustice to no one, they will put a stop to millions of wrongs, they will guarantee to our posterity the possibility of a higher career in every way, without the burdensome disadvantages which crowd us to low planes of life. There is no room with us for the confirmed criminal; there is less room for his offspring, for they pollute the place whereon they stand.



CHILD'S first attempts at drawing are pre-artistic and a kind of play, an outcome of the instinctive love of finding and producing semblances of things. Sitting at the table and covering a sheet of paper with line-scribble, he is wholly self-centered, "amusing himself," as we say, and caring nothing about the production of "objective values."

Yet even in the early stages of infantile drawing the social element of art is suggested in the impulse of the small draughtsman to make his lines indicative of something to others' eyes, as when he bids his mother look at the "man," "gee-gee," or what else he fancies that he has delineated, And this, though crude enough and apt to shock the aesthetic sense of the matured artist by its unsightliness, is closely related to art, forming, indeed, in a manner a preliminary stage of pictorial design.

We shall therefore study children's drawings as a kind of rude