Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/396

390 data, which I think will become general when eugenics has been made a subject of academic study, and minds specially trained to this branch of scientific inquiry are placed at the disposal of our statesmen. I do not, of course, say that there was no eugenic research before Francis Galton invented the word and named the new science. But I believe the day not distant when we shall recognize that he seized the psychological moment to assert its claim to academic consideration; and that in the time to come the nation will be more than grateful to the man who said that the university is the true field for the study of those agencies which may improve or impair our racial qualities. To become a true science, you must remove our study from the strife of parties, from the conflict of creeds, from false notions of charity, or the unbalanced impulses of sentiment. You must treat it with the observational caution and critical spirit that you give to other branches of biology. And when you have discovered its principles and deduced its laws, then, and then only, you can question how far they are consonant with current moral ideas or with prevailing human sentiment. I myself look forward to a future when a wholly new view as to patriotism will be accepted; when the individual will recognize more fully and more clearly the conflict between individual interests and national duties. I foresee a time when the welfare of the nation will form a more conspicuous factor in conduct; when conscious race-culture will cope with the ills which arise when we suspend the full purifying force of natural selection; and when charity will not be haphazard—the request for it being either a social right, or the granting of it an anti-social wrong. But if we are to build up a strong nation, sound in mind and body, we shall have to work in the future with trained insight: I feel convinced that real enlightenment will only follow a scientific treatment of the biological factors in race development.

There is an element of danger in the study of eugenics, which I would not have you overlook. If the attention be fixed on the factors which make for deterioration; if we spend our days over statistics of the insane, the mentally defective, the criminal, the tuberculous, the blind, the deaf and the diseased, the inevitableness of it all is apt to reduce us to the lowest depths of depression. But this is only one side of the picture; the inevitableness is just as marked when we come to deal with health and strength, with ability and intelligence. If the iniquity of the fathers be visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation—assuredly so is their virtue. If this needs emphasis, study the two pedigrees I put before you. In Fig. 1 we have the pedigree of a family in which eccentricity, insanity and phthisis have recurred generation by generation—associated occasionally with great ability. The general "want of mental balance" is the mark of the stock. In Fig. 2 we have the pedigree of a family in which extreme